
i 



THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 
AT THE PRESENT TIME 



AND 



AN ESSAY ON STYLE 



» 






•» 



Mm 



The Function of Criticism 
AT THE Present Time 

/ 

By MATTHEW ARNOLD 

{Reprinted /rom " Essays in Criticism ") 
AND 

An Essay on Style 

By WALTER PATER 
{Reprinted /rom " Appreciations ") 



mhj lark 
MACMILLAN AND COMPANY 

AND LONDON 



3EP 11 189f 

All rights reserved ^ ^^"i 




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Copyright, 1895, 
By MACMILLAN AND CO. 



Norfajooti ^rrss 

J. S. Cushing & Co. -- Berwick & Smith 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 



I. 



THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 
AT THE PRESENT TIME. 

B 



I 



I. 

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 
AT THE PRESENT TIME. 

JV /I ANY objections have been made 
•^ '^ * to a proposition which, in some 
remarks of mine on translating Homer, 
I ventured to put forth; a proposition 
about criticism, and its importance at 
the present day. I said : " Of the lit- 
erature of France and Germany, as of 
the intellect of Europe in general, the 
main effort, for now many years, has 
been a critical effort; the endeavour, 
in all branches of knowledge, theology, 
philosophy, history, art, science, to see 
the object as in itself it really is." I 
added, that owing to the operation in 

3 



4 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

English literature of certain causes, 
"almost the last thing for which one 
would come to English literature is 
just that very thing which now Europe 
most desires, — criticism;" and that 
the power and value of English litera- 
ture was thereby impaired. More than 
one rejoinder declared that the impor- 
tance I here assigned to criticism was 
excessive, and asserted the inherent 
superiority of the creative effort of 
the human spirit over its critical 
effort. And the other day, having 
been led by a Mr. Shairp's excellent 
notice of Wordsworth^ to turn again 
to his biography, I found, in the words 

1 I cannot help thinking that a practice, com- 
mon in England during the last century, and stilj 
followed in France, of printing a notice of this 
kind, — a notice by a competent critic, — to serve 
as an introduction to an eminent author's works, 
might be revived among us with advantage. To 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 5 

of this great man, whom I, for one, 
must always listen to with the pro- 
foundest respect, a sentence passed 
on the critic's business, which seems 
to justify every possible disparagement 
of it. Wordsworth says in one of his 
letters : — 

"The writers in these publications" 
(the Reviews), "while they prosecute 
their inglorious employment, can not 
be supposed to be in a state of mind 
very favourable for being affected by 
the finer influences of a thing so pure 
as genuine poetry." 

introduce all succeeding editions of Wordsworth, 
Mr. Shairp's notice might, it seems to me, ex- 
cellently serve ; it is written from the point of 
view of an admirer, nay, of a disciple, and that 
is right ; but then the disciple must be also, as in 
this case he is, a critic, a man of letters, not, as too 
often happens, some relation or friend with no 
qualification for his task except affection for his 
author. 



6 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

And a trustworthy reporter of h s 
conversation quotes a more elaborate 
judgment to the same effect: — 

"Wordsworth holds the critical 
power very low, infinitely lower than 
the inventive; and he said to-day 
that if the quantity of time consumed 
in writing critiques on the works of 
others were given to original com- 
position, of whatever kind it might 
be, it would be much better em- 
ployed; it would make a man find 
out sooner his own level, and it 
would do infinitely less mischief. A 
false or malicious criticism may do 
much injury to the minds of others, 
a stupid invention, either in prose or 
verse, is quite harmless." 

It is almost too much to expect of 
poor human nature, that a man capable 
of producing some effect in one line of 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 7 

literature, should, for the greater good 
of society, voluntarily doom himself 
to impotence and obscurity in another. 
Still less is this to be expected from 
men addicted to the composition of 
the "false or malicious criticism" of 
which Wordsworth speaks. However, 
everybody would admit that a false or 
malicious criticism had better never 
have been written. Everybody, too, 
would be willing to admit, as a gen- 
eral proposition, that the critical fac- 
ulty is lower than the inventive. But 
is it true that criticism is really, in 
itself, a baneful and injurious employ- 
ment; is it true that all time given to 
writing critiques on the works of 
others would be much better em- 
ployed if it were given to original 
composition, of whatever kind this 
may be? Is it true that Johnson 



8 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

had better have gone on producing 
more L^eiies instead of writing his 
Lives of the Poets; nay, is it certain 
that Wordsworth himself was better 
employed in making his Ecclesiasti- 
cal Sonnets than when he made his 
celebrated Preface, so full of criti- 
cism, and criticism of the works of 
others? Wordsworth was himself a 
great critic, and it is to be sincerely 
regretted that he has not left us more 
criticism; LGoethe was one of the 
greatest of critics, and we may sin- 
cerely congratulate ourselves that he 
has left us so much criticism. With- 
out wasting time over the exaggera- 
tion which Wordsworth's judgment 
on criticism clearly contains, or over 
an attempt to trace the causes, — 
not difficult, I think, to be traced, — 
which may have led Wordsworth to 



AT THE PRESENT TLME. 9 

this exaggeration, a critic may with 
advantage seize an occasion for trying 
his own conscience, and for asking 
himself of what real service at any 
given moment the practice of criti- 
cism either is or may be made to his 
own mind and spirit, and to the minds 
and spirits of others. 

The critical power is of lower rank \/ ' 
than the creative. True; but in as- 
senting to this proposition, one or 
two things are to be kept in mind. 
It is undeniable that the exercise of 
a creative power, that a free creative 
activity, is the highest function of 
man; it is proved to be so by man's 
finding in it his true happiness. But 
it is undeniable, also, that men may 
have the sense of exercising this free 
creative activity in other ways than in 
producing great works of literature or 



lO THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

art; if it were not so, all but a very 
few men would be shut out from the 
true happiness of all men. They may 
have it in well-doing, they may have 
it in learning, they may have it even 
in criticising. This is one thing to 
be kept in mind. Another is, that 
the exercise of the creative power 
in the production of great works of 
literature or art, however high this 
exercise of it may rank, is not at 
all epochs and under all conditions 
possible; and that therefore labour 
may be vainly spent in attempting it, 
which might with more fruit be used 
in preparing for it, in rendering it 
possible. This creative power works 
with elements, with materials; what 
if it has not those materials, those 
elements, ready for its use? In that 
case it must surely wait till they are 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. II 

ready. Now, in literature, — I will 
limit myself to literature, for it is 
about literature that the question 
arises, — the elements with which the 
creative power works are ideas; the 
best ideas on every matter which lit- 
erature touches, current at the time. 
At any rate we may lay it down as 
certain that in modern literature no 
m.anifestation of the creative power 
not working with these can be very 
important or fruitful. And I say 
current at the time, not merely ac- 
cessible at the time; for creative liter- 
ary genius does not principally show 
itself in discovering new ideas, that is 
rather the business of the philosopher. 
The grand work of literary genius is a 
work of synthesis and exposition, not 
of analysis and discovery; its gift lies 
in the faculty of being happily inspired 



12 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

by a certain intellectual and spiritual 
atmosphere, by a certain order of ideas, 
when it finds itself in them; of dealing 
divinely with these ideas, presenting 
them in the most effective and at- 
tractive combinations, — making beau- 
tiful works with them, in short. But 
it must have the atmosphere, it must 
find itself amidst the order of ideas, 
in order to work freely; and these it 
is not so easy to command. This is 
why great creative epochs in litera- 
ture are so rare, this is why there is 
so much that is unsatisfactory in the 
productions of many men of real 
genius; because, for the creation of 
a master-work of literature two pow- 
ers must concur, the power of the 
man and the power of the moment, 
and the man is not enough without 
the moment; the creative power has. 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 1 3 

for its happy exercise, appointed ele- 
ments, and those elements are not in 
its own control. 

Nay, they are more within the con- 
trol of the critical power. It is the 
business of the critical power, as I 
said in the words already quoted, 
"in all branches of knowledge, the- 
ology, philosophy, history, art, sci- 
ence, to see the object as in itself it 
really is." Thus it tends, at last, to 
make an intellectual situation of which 
the creative power can profitably avail 
itself. It tends to establish an order 
of ideas, if not absolutely true, yet 
true by comparison with that which 
it displaces; to make the best ideas 
prevail. Presently these new ideas 
reach society, the touch of truth is 
the touch of life, and there is a stir 
and growth everywhere; out of this 



14 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

stir and growth come the creative 
epochs of literature. 

Or, to narrow our range, and quit 
these considerations of the general 
march of genius and of society, — 
considerations which are apt to be- 
come too abstract and impalpable, — 
every one can see that a poet, for in- 
stance, ought to know life and the 
world before dealing with them in 
poetry; and life and the world being 
in modern times very complex things, 
the creation of a modern poet, to be 
worth much, implies a great critical 
effort behind it; else it must be a 
comparatively poor, barren, and short- 
lived affair. This is why Byron's po- 
etry had so little endurance in it, and 
Goethe's so much; both Byron and 
Goethe had a great productive power, 
but Goethe's was nourished by a great 



1 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 1 5 

critical effort providing the true ma- 
terials for it, and Byron's was not; 
Goethe knew life and the world, the 
poet's necessary subjects, much more 
comprehensively and thoroughly than 
Byron. He knew a great deal more 
of them, and he knew them much 
more as they really are. 

It has long seemed to me that the 
burst of creative activity in our liter- 
ature, through the first quarter of this 
century, had about it in fact something 
premature; and that from this cause 
its productions are doomed, most of 
them, in spite of the sanguine hopes 
which accompanied and do still ac- 
company them, to prove hardly more 
lasting than the productions of far less 
splendid epochs. And this prema- 
tureness comes from its having pro- 
ceeded without having its proper 



1 6 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

data, without sufficient materials to 
work with. In other words, the Eng- 
lish poetry of the first quarter of this 
century, with plenty of energy, plenty 
of creative force, did not know 
enough. This makes Byron so empty 
of matter, Shelley so incoherent, 
Wordsworth even, profound as he is, 
yet so wanting in completeness and 
variety. Wordsworth cared little for 
books, and disparaged Goethe. I 
admire Wordsworth, as he is, so 
much that I cannot wish him differ- 
ent; and it is vain, no doubt, to im- 
agine such a man different from what 
he is, to suppose that he could have 
been different. But surely the one 
thing wanting to make Wordsworth 
an even greater poet than he is, — 
his thought richer, and his influence 
of wider application, — was that he 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 1 7 

should have read more books, among 
them, no doubt, those of that Goethe 
whom he disparaged without reading 
him. 

But to speak of books and reading 
may easily lead to a misunderstand- 
ing here. It was not really books 
and reading that lacked to our poetry 
at this epoch; Shelley had plenty 
of reading, Coleridge had immense 
reading. Pindar and Sophocles — 
as we all say so glibly, and often 
with so little discernment of the real 
import of what we are saying — had 
not many books; Shakspeare was no 
deep reader. True; but in the Greece 
of Pindar and Sophocles, in the Eng- 
land of Shakspeare, the poet lived in 
a current of ideas in the highest de- 
gree animating and nourishing to the 
creative power; society was, in the 
c 



1 8 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

fullest measure, permeated by fresh 
thought, intelligent and alive. And 
this state of things is the true basis 
for the creative power's exercise, in 
this it finds its data, its materials, 
truly ready for its hand; all the books 
and reading in the world are only val- 
uable as they are helps to this. Even 
when this does not actually exist, 
books and reading may enable a man 
to construct a kind of semblance of 
it in his own mind, a world of knowl- 
edge and intelligence in which he may 
live and work. This is by no means 
an equivalent to the artist for the 
nationally diffused life and thought 
of the epochs of Sophocles or Shak- 
speare; but, besides that it may be a 
means of preparation for such epochs, 
it does really constitute, if many share 
in it, a quickening and sustaining at- 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 1 9 

mosphere of great value. Such an 
atmosphere the many-sided learning 
and the long and widely-combined 
critical effort of Germany formed for 
Goethe, when he lived and worked. 
There was no national glow of life 
and thought there as in the Athens 
of Pericles or the England of Eliza- 
beth. That was the poet's weakness. 
But there was a sort of equivalent for 
it in the complete culture and unfet- 
tered thinking of a large body of Ger- 
mans. That was his strength. In the 
England of the first quarter of this 
century there was neither a national 
glow of life and thought, such as we 
had in the age of Elizabeth, nor yet 
a culture and a force of learning and 
criticism such as were to be found 
in Germany. Therefore the creative 
power of poetry wanted, for success 



20 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

in the highest sense, materials and a 
basis; a thorough interpretation of the 
world was necessarily denied to it. 

At first sight it seems strange that 
out of the immense stir of the French 
Revolution and its age should not have 
come a crop of works of genius equal 
to that which came out of the stir of 
the great productive time of Greece, 
or out of that of the Renascence, with 
its powerful episode the Reformation. 
But the truth is that the stir of the 
French Revolution took a character 
which essentially distinguished it from 
such movements as these. These were, 
in the main, disinterestedly intellec- 
tual and spiritual movements; move- 
ments in which the human spirit 
looked for its satisfaction in itself 
and in the increased play of its own 
activity. The French Revolution took 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 21 

a political, practical character. The 
movement which went on in France 
under the old regime, from 1700 to 
1789, was far more really akin than 
that of the Revolution itself to the 
movement of the Renascence; the 
France of Voltaire and Rousseau told 
far more powerfully upon the mind 
of Europe than the France of the 
Revolution. Goethe reproached this 
last expressly with having " thrown 
quiet culture back." Nay, and the 
true key to how much in our Byron, 
even in our Wordsworth, is this ! — 
that they had their source in a great 
movement of feeling, not in a great 
movement of mind. The French 
Revolution, however, — that object 
of so much blind love and so much 
blind hatred, — found undoubtedly 
its motive-power in the intelligence 



2 2 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

of men, and not in their practical 
sense; this is what distinguishes it 
from the English Revolution of Charles 
the First's time. This is what makes 
it a more spiritual event than our 
Revolution, an event of much more 
powerful and world-wide interest, 
though practically less successful; it 
appeals to an order of ideas which are 
universal, certain, permanent. 1789 
asked of a thing, Is it rational? 1642 
asked of a thing, Is it legal? or, when 
it went furthest, Is it according to con- 
science? This is the English fashion, 
a fashion to be treated, within its own 
sphere, with the highest respect; for 
its success, within its own sphere, has 
been prodigious. But what is law in 
one place is not law in another; what 
is law here to-day is not law even here 
to-morrow; and as for conscience, what 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 23 

is binding on one man's conscience 
is not binding on another's. The old 
woman who threw her stool at the head 
of the surpliced minister in St. Giles's 
Church at Edinburgh obeyed an im- 
pulse to which millions of the human 
race may be permitted to remain 
strangers. But the prescriptions of 
reason are absolute, unchanging, of 
universal avidity; to count by tens is 
the easiest way of counting — that is a 
proposition of which every one, from 
here to the Antipodes, feels the force; 
at least I should say so if we did not 
live in a country where it is not im- 
possible, that any morning we may 
find a letter in the Times declaring 
that a decimal coinage is an absurd- 
ity. That a whole nation should have 
been penetrated with an enthusiasm 
for pure reason, and with an ardent 



24 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

zeal for making its prescriptions tri- 
umph, is a very remarkable thing, 
when we consider how little of mind, 
or anything so worthy and quickening 
as mind, comes into the motives which 
alone, in general, impel great masses 
of men. In spite of the extravagant 
direction given to this enthusiasm, in i 
spite of the crimes and follies in 
which it lost itself, the French Rev- 
olution derives from the force, truth, 
and universality of the ideas which it 
took for its law, and from the passion 
with which it could inspire a multi- 
tude for these ideas, a unique and 
still living power; it is — it will 
probably long remain — the greatest, 
the most animating event in history. 
And as no sincere passion for the 
things of the mind, even though it 
turn out in many respects an unfortu- 



1 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 25 

nate passion, is ever quite thrown 
away and quite barren of good, 
France has reaped from hers one fruit 
— the natural and legitimate fruit, 
though not precisely the grand fruit 
she expected : she is the country in 
Europe where the people is most alive. 
But the mania for giving an immedi- 
ate political and practical application 
to all these fine ideas of the reason 
was fatal. Here an Englishman is in 
his element: on this theme we can all 
go on for hours. And all we are in 
the habit of saying on it has undoubt- 
edly a great deal of truth. Ideas can- 
not be too much prized in and for 
themselves, cannot be too much lived 
with; but to transport them abruptly 
into the world of politics and practice, 
violently to revolutionise this world "to 
their bidding, — that is quite another 



26 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

thing. There is the world of ideas 
and there is the world of practice; the 
French are often for suppressing the 
one and the English the other; but 
neither is to be suppressed. A mem- 
ber of the House of Commons said to 
me the other day : " That a thing is an 
anomaly, I consider to be no objec- i 
tion to it whatever." I venture to 
think he was wrong; that a thing is 
an anomaly is an objection to it, but 
absolutely and in the sphere of ideas : 
it is not necessarily, under such and 
such circumstances, or at such and 
such a moment, an objection to it in 
the sphere of politics and practice. 
Joubert has said beautifully: "C'est 
la force et le droit qui reglent toutes 
choses dans le monde; la force en 
attendant le droit." (Force and right 
are the governors of this world; force 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 27 

till right is ready. ) Force till light is 
ready ; and till right is ready, force, 
the existing order of things, is justi- 
fied, is the legitimate ruler. But right 
is something moral, and implies inward 
recognition, free assent of the will; 
we are not ready for right, — rights so 
far as we are concerned, is not ready, 
— until we have attained this sense of 
seeing it and willing it. The way in 
which for us it may change and trans- 
form force, the existing order of things, 
and become, in its turn, the legiti- 
mate ruler of the world, should de- 
pend on the way in which, when our 
time comes, we see it and will it. 
Therefore, for other people enamoured 
of their own newly discerned right, to 
attempt to impose it upon us as ours, 
and violently to substitute their right 
for our force, is an act of tyranny, 



2 8 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISIM 

and to be resisted. It sets at nought 
the second great half of our maxim, 
force till right is ready. This was the 
grand error of the French Revolution; 
and its movement of ideas, by quit- 
ting the intellectual sphere and rush- 
ing furiously into the political sphere, 
ran, indeed, a prodigious and mem- 
orable course, but produced no such 
intellectual fruit as the movement of 
ideas of the Renascence, and created, 
in opposition to itself, what I may call 
an epoch of concentration. The great 
force of that epoch of concentration 
was England; and the great voice of 
that epoch of concentration was Burke. 
It is the fashion to treat Burke's writ- 
ings on the French Revolution as 
superannuated and conquered by the 
event; as the eloquent but unphilo- 
sophical tirades of bigotry and preju- 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 29 

dice. I will not deny that they are 
often disfigured by the violence and 
passion of the moment, and that in 
some directions Burke's view was 
bounded, and his observation there- 
fore at fault. But on the whole, and 
for those who can make the needful 
corrections, what distinguishes these 
writings is their profound, permanent, 
fruitful, philosophical truth. They 
contain the true philosophy of an 
epoch of concentration, dissipate the 
heavy atmosphere which its own na- 
ture is apt to engender round it, and 
make its resistance rational instead of 
mechanical. 

But Burke is so great because, al- 
most alone in England, he brings 
thought to bear upon politics, he 
saturates politics with thought. It is 
his accident that his ideas were at the 



30 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

service of an epoch of concentration, 
not of an epoch of expansion; it is 
his characteristic that he so lived by 
ideas, and had such a source of them 
welling up within him, that he could 
float even an epoch of concentration 
and English Tory politics with them. 
It does not hurt him that Dr. Price 
and the Liberals were enraged with 
him; it does not even hurt him that 
George the Third and the Tories were 
enchanted with him. His greatness is 
that he lived in a world which neither 
English Liberalism nor English Tory- 
ism is apt to enter; — the world of 
ideas, not the world of catchwords 
and party habits. So far is it from 
being really true of him that he '' to 
party gave up what was meant for 
mankind," that at the very end of his 
fierce struggle with the French Revo- I 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 3 1 

iution, after all his invectives against 
its false pretensions, hollowness, and 
madness, with his sincere conviction 
of its mischievousness, he can close a 
memorandum on the best means of 
combating it, some of the last pages 
he ever wrote, — the Thoughts on 
French Affairs, in December 1791, 
— with these striking words : — 

"The evil is stated, in my opinion, 
as it exists. The remedy must be 
where power, wisdom, and informa- 
tion, I hope, are more united with 
good intentions than they can be 
with me. I have done with this sub- 
ject, I believe, for ever. It has given 
me many anxious moments for the last 
two years. If a great change is to be 
made in human affairs, the minds of 
men will be fitted to it ; the general 
opinions and feelings will draw that 



32 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

way. Every fear, every hope will for- 
ward it; and then they who persist in 
opposing this mighty curreiit in human 
affairs, will appear rather to resist the 
decrees of Providence itself, than the 
mere designs of men. They will not 
be resolute and firm, but perverse and 
obstinate.''^ 

That return of Burke upon himself 
has ahvays seemed to me one of the 
finest things in English literature, or 
indeed in any literature. That is what 
I call living by ideas: when one side 
of a question has long had your 
earnest support, when all your feel- 
ings are engaged, when you hear all 
round you no language but one, when 
your party talks this language like a 
steam-engine and can imagine no 
other, — still to be able to think, 
still to be irresistibly carried, if so 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 33 

it be, by the current of thought to the 
opposite side of the question, and, 
like Balaam, to be unable to speak 
anything but what the Lord has put 
in your uiouth. I know nothing more 
striking, and I must add that I know 
nothing more un-English. 

For the Englishman in general is 
like my friend the Member of Parlia- 
ment, and believes, point-blank, that 
for a thing to be an anomaly is ab- 
solutely no objection to it whatever. 
He is like the Lord Auckland of 
Burke's day, who, in a memorandum 
on the French Revolution, talks of 
"certain miscreants, assuming the 
name of philosophers, who have pre- 
sumed themselves capable of establish- 
ing a new system of society." The 
Englishman has been called a politi- 
cal animal, and he values what is polit- 

D 



34 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

ical and practical so much that ideas 
easily become objects of dislike in his 
eyes, and thinkers "miscreants," be- 
cause ideas and thinkers have rashly 
meddled with politics and practice. 
This would be all very well if the dis- 
like and neglect confined themselves 
to ideas transported out of their own 
sphere, and meddling rashly with prac- 
tice; but they are inevitably extended 
to ideas as such, and to the whole life 
of intelligence; practice is everything, 
a free play of the mind is nothing. 
The notion of the free play of the 
mind upon all subjects being a pleas- 
ure in itself, being an object of desire, 
being an essential provider of elements 
without which a nation's spirit, what- 
ever compensations it may have for 
them, must, in the long run, die of 
inanition, hardly enters into an Eng- 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 35 

lishman's thoughts. It is noticeable 
that the word curiosity, which in other 
languages is used in a good sense, to 
mean, as a high and fine quality of 
man's nature, just this disinterested 
love of a free play of the mind on all 
subjects, for its own sake, — it is no- 
ticeable, I say, that this word has in 
our language no sense of the kind, no 
sense but a rather bad and disparag- 
ing one. PBut criticism, real criti- 
cism, is essentially the exercise of 
this very quality. It obeys an in- 
stinct prompting it to try to know the 
best that is known and thought in 
the world, irrespectively of practice, 
politics, and everything of the kind; 
and to value knowledge and thought 
as they approach this best, without 
the intrusion of any other considera- 
tions whatever. This is an instinct 



36 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

for which there is, I think, little orig- 
inal sympathy in the practical English 
nature, and what there was of it has 
undergone a long benumbing period 
of blight and suppression in the epoch 
of concentration which followed the 
French Revolution. 

But epochs of concentration cannot 
well endure for ever; epochs of ex- 
pansion, in the due course of things, 
follow them. Such an epoch of expan- 
sion seems to be opening in this coun- 
try. In the first place all danger of 
a hostile forcible pressure of foreign 
ideas upon our practice has long dis- 
appeared; like the traveller in the 
fable, therefore, we begin to wear our 
cloak a little more loosely. Then, 
with a long peace, the ideas of Europe 
steal gradually and amicably in, and 
mingle, though in infinitesimally small 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 37 

quantities at a time, with our own 
notions. Tlien, too, in spite of all 
that is said about the absorbing and 
brutalising influence of our passionate 
material progress, it seems to me in- 
disputable that this progress is likely, 
though not certain, to lead in the end 
to an apparition of intellectual life; 
and that man, after he has made him- 
self perfectly comfortable and has now 
to determine what to do with himself 
next, may begin to remember that he 
has a mind, and that the mind may 
be made the source of great pleasure. 
I grant it is mainly the privilege of 
faith, at present, to discern this end 
to our railways, our business, and our 
fortune-making; but we shall see if, 
here as elsewhere, faith is not in the 
end the true prophet. Our ease, our 
travelling, and our unbounded liberty 



-/ 



38 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

to hold just as hard and securely as 
we please to the practice to which our 
notions have given birth, all tend to 
beget an inclination to deal a little 
more freely with these notions them- 
selves, to canvass them a little, to 
penetrate a little into their real na- 
ture. Flutterings of curiosity, in the 
foreign sense of the word, appear 
amongst us, and it is in these that 
criticism must look to find its ac- 
count. Criticism first; a time of true 
creative activity, perhaps, — which, 
as I have said, must inevitably be 
preceded amongst us by a time of 
criticism, — hereafter, when criticism 
has done its work. 

It is of the last importance that 
English criticism should clearly dis- 
cern what rule for its course, in order 
to avail itself of the field now open- 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 39 

ing to it, and to produce fruit for the 
future, it ought to take. The rule 
may be summed up in one word, — 
disinterestedness. And how is criti- 
cism to show disinterestedness? By 
keeping aloof from what is called " the 
practical view of things; "■ by reso- 
lutely following the law of its own 
nature, which is to be a free play of 
the mind on all subjects which it 
touches. By steadily refusing to lend 
itself to any of those ulterior, political, 
practical considerations about ideas, 
which plenty of people will be sure 
to attach to them, which perhaps 
ought often to be attached to them, 
which in this country at any rate are 
certain to be attached to them quite 
sufficiently, but which criticism has 
really nothing to do with. Its busi- 
ness is, as I have said, simply to know 



I 



40 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

the best that is known and thought in 
the world, and by in its turn making 
this known, to create a current of true 
and fresh ideas. Its business is to do 
this with inflexible honesty, with due 
ability; but its business is to do no 
more, and to leave alone all questions 
of practical consequences and appli- 
cations, questions which will never 
fail to have due prominence given to 
them. Else criticism, besides being 
really false to its own nature, merely 
continues in the old rut which it has 
hitherto followed in this country, and 
will certainly miss the chance now 
given to it. For what is at present 
the bane of criticism in this country? 
It is that practical considerations cling 
to it and stifle it. It subserves inter- 
ests not its own. Or organs of criti- 
cism are organs of men and parties 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 4 1 

having practical ends to serve, and 
with them those practical ends are 
the first thing and the play of mind 
the second; so much play of mind as 
is compatible with the prosecution 
of those practical ends is all that is 
wanted. An organ like the Revue 
des Deux Mofides, having for its main 
function to understand and utter the 
best that is known and thought in 
the world, existing, it may be said, 
as just an organ for a free play of 
the mind, we have not. But we 
have the Edinburgh Review, existing 
as an organ of the old Whigs, and 
for as much play of the mind as 
may suit its being that; we have the 
Quarterly Review, existing as an or- 
gan of the Tories, and for as much 
play of mind as may suit its being 
that; we have the British Quarterly 



42 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

Review, existing as an organ of the 
political Dissenters, and for as much 
play of mind as may suit its being 
that; we have the Times, existing as 
an organ of the common, satisfied, 
well-to-do Englishman, and for as 
much play of mind as may suit its 
being that. And so on through all the 
various fractions, political and relig- 
ious, of our society; every fraction has, 
as such, its organ of criticism, but the 
notion of combining all fractions in 
the common pleasure of a free dis- 
interested play of mind meets with no 
favour. Directly this play of mind 
wants to have more scope, and to 
forget the pressure of practical con- 
siderations a little, it is checked, it 
is made to feel the chain. We saw 
this the other day in the extinction, f 
so much to be regretted, of the Home 



i 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 43 

and Foreign Review. Perhaps in no 
organ of criticism in this country was 
there so much knowledge, so much 
play of mind; but these could not 
save it. The Dublin Revieiu subor- 
dinates play of mind to the practical 
business of English and Irish Cathol- 
icism, and lives. It must needs be 
that men should act in sects and par- 
ties, that each of these sects and par- 
ties should have its organ, and should 
make this organ subserve the interests 
of its action; but it would be well, 
too, that there should be a criticism, 
not the minister of these interests, not 
their enemy, but absolutely and en- 
tirely independent of them. No other 
criticism will ever attain any real au- 
thority or make any real way towards 
its end, — the creating a current of 
true and fresh ideas. 



44 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

It is because criticism has so little 
kept in the pure intellectual sphere, 
has so little detached itself from prac- 
tice, has been so directly polemical 
and controversial, that it has so ill 
accomplished, in this country, its best 
spiritual work; which is to keep man 
from a self-satisfaction which is re- 
tarding and vulgarising, to lead him 
towards perfection, by making his 
mind dwell upon what is excellent 
in itself, and the absolute beauty 
and fitness of things. A polemical 
practical criticism makes men blind 
even to the ideal imperfection of their 
practice, makes them willingly assert 
its ideal perfection, in order the bet- 
ter to secure it against attack; and 
clearly this is narrowing and baneful 
for them. If they were reassured on 
the practical side, speculative consid- 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 45 

erations of ideal perfection they might 
be brought to entertain, and their 
spiritual horizon would thus gradually 
widen. Sir Charles Adderley says 
to the Warwickshire farmers : — 

"Talk of the improvement of breed! 
Why, the rac? we ourselves represent, 
the men and women, the old Anglo- 
Saxon race, are the best breed in the 
whole world. . . . The absence of a 
too enervating climate, too unclouded 
skies, and a too luxurious nature, has 
produced so vigorous a race of people, 
and has rendered us so superior to all 
the world." 

Mr. Roebuck says to the Sheffield 
.cutlers : — 

" I look around me and ask what is 
the state of England? Is not prop- 
erty safe? Is not every man able to 
say what he likes? Can you not walk 



46 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

from one end of England to the other 
in perfect security ? I ask you whether, 
the world over or in past history, there 
is anything like it? Nothing. I pray 
that our unrivalled happiness may last. " 
Now obviously there is a peril for 
poor human nature in words and 
thoughts of such exuberant self-satis- 
faction, until we find ourselves safe in 
the streets of the Celestial City. 

" Das wenige verschwindet leicht dem Blicke 
Der vorvvarts sieht, wie viel noch iibrig 
bleibt— " 

says Goethe; "the little that is done 
seems nothing when we look forward 
and see how much we have yet to do." 
Clearly this is a better line of reflec- 
tion for weak humanity, so long as it 
remains on this earthly field of labour 
and trial. 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 47 

But neither Sir Charles Adderley nor 
Mr. Roebuck is by nature inaccessible 
to considerations of this sort. They 
only lose sight of them owing to 
the controversial life we all lead, and 
the practical form which all specula- 
tion takes with us. They have in view 
opponents whose aim is not ideal, but 
practical; and in their zeal to uphold 
their own practice against these inno- 
vators, they go so far as even to attrib- 
ute to this practice an ideal perfection. 
Somebody has been wanting to in- 
troduce a six-pound franchise, or to 
abolish church-rates, or to collect 
agricultural statistics by force, or to 
diminish local self-government. How 
natural, in reply to such proposals, 
very likely improper or ill-timed, to 
go a little beyond the mark, and to 
say stoutly, "Such a race of people 



41 

48 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 



as we stand, so superior to all the 
world ! The old Anglo-Saxon race, 
the best breed in the whole world ! 
I pray that our unrivalled happiness 
may last ! I ask you whether, the world 
over or in past history, there is any- 
thing like it? " And so long as criti- 
cism answers this dithyramb by insisting 
that the old Anglo-Saxon race would be 
still more superior to all others if it 
had no church-rates, or that our unri- 
valled happiness would last yet longer 
with a six-pound franchise, so long 
will the strain, "The best breed in 
the whole world ! " swell louder and 
louder, everything ideal and refining 
will be lost out of sight, and both the 
assailed and their critics will remain 
in a sphere, to say the truth, perfectly 
unvital, a sphere in which spiritual 
progression is impossible. But let 



'I 



II 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 49 

criticism leave church-rates and the 
franchise alone, and in the most 
candid spirit, v/ithout a single lurking 
thought of practical innovation, con- 
front with our dithyramb this par- 
agraph on which I stumbled in a 
newspaper immediately after reading 
Mr. Roebuck: — 

"A shocking child murder has just 
been committed at Nottingham. A 
girl named Wragg left the workhouse 
there on Saturday morning with her 
young illegitimate child. The child 
was soon afterwards found dead on 
Mapperly Hills, having been strangled. 
Wragg is in custody." 

Nothing but that; but, in juxtapo- 
sition with the absolute eulogies of 
Sir Charles Adderley and Mr. Roe- 
buck, how eloquent, how suggestive 
are those few lines! "Our old Anglo- 

E 



50 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

Saxon breed, the best in the whole 
world! " — how much that is harsh 
and ill-favoured there is in this best! 
Wragg / If we are to talk of ideal 
perfection, of " the best in the whole 
world," has any one reflected what a 
touch of grossness in our race, what 
an original shortcoming in the more 
delicate spiritual perceptions, is shown 
by the natural growth amongst us of 
such hideous names, — Higginbottom, 
Stiggins, Bugg! In Ionia and Attica 
they were luckier in this respect than 
"the best race in the world; " by the 
Ilissus there was no Wragg, poor 
thing! And "our unrivalled happi- 
ness;" — what an element of grimness, 
bareness, and hideousness mixes with 
it and blurs it; the workhouse, the , 
dismal Mapperly Hills, — how dis- 
mal those who have seen them will 



I 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 5 1 

remember; — the gloom, the smoke, 
the cold, the strangled illegitimate 
child ! " I ask you whether, the world 
over or in past history, there is any- 
thing like it?" Perhaps not, one is 
inclined to answer; but at any rate, 
in that case, the world is very much 
to be pitied. And the final touch, 
— short, bleak, and inhuman : IVragg 
is in custody. The sex lost in the 
confusion of our unrivalled happi- 
ness; or (shall I say?) the superflu- 
ous Christian name lopped off by the 
straightforward vigour of our old Anglo- 
Saxon breed ! There is profit for the 
spirit in such contrasts as this; criti- 
cism serves the cause of perfection by 
establishing them. By eluding sterile 
conflict, by refusing to remain in the 
sphere where alone narrow and rela- 
tive conceptions have any worth and 



52 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

validity, criticism may diminish its 
momentary importance, but only in 
this way has it a chance of gaining 
admittance for those wider and more 
perfect conceptions to which all its 
duty is really owed. Mr. Roebuck 
will have a poor opinion of an adver- 
sary who replies to his defiant songs 
of triumph only by murmuring under 
his breath, Wi'agg is i?i custody; but 
in no other way will these songs of 
triumph be induced gradually to mod- 
erate themselves, to get rid of what in 
them is excessive and offensive, and 
to fall into a softer and truer key. 

It will be said that it is a very subtle 
and indirect action which I am thus 
prescribing for criticism, and that, 
by embracing in this manner the Ind- 
ian virtue of detachment and aban- 
doning the sphere of practical life, it 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 53 

condemns itself to a slow and obscure 
work. Slow and obscure it may be, 
but it is the only proper work of crit- 
icism. The mass of mankind will 
never have any ardent zeal for seeing 
things as they are; very inadequate 
ideas will always satisfy them. On 
these inadequate ideas reposes, and 
must repose, the general practice of 
the world. That is as much as saying 
that whoever sets himself to see things 
as they are will find himself one of a 
very small circle; but it is only by 
this small circle resolutely doing its 
own work that adequate ideas will 
ever get current at all. The rush 
and roar of practical life will always 
have a dizzying and attracting effect 
upon the most collected spectator, 
and tend to draw him into its vortex; 
most of all will this be the case where 



54 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

that life is so powerful as it is in Eng- 
land. But it is only by remaining 
collected, and refusing to lend him- 
self to the point of view of the prac- 
tical man, that the critic can do the 
practical man any service; and it is 
only by the greatest sincerity in pur- 
suing his own course, and by at last 
convincing even the practical man 
of his sincerity, that he can escape 
misunderstandings which perpetually 
threaten him. 

For the practical man is not apt for 
fine distinctions, and yet in these dis- 
tinctions truth and the highest culture 
greatly find their account. But it is 
not easy to lead a practical man, — 
unless you reassure him as to your 
practical intentions, you have no 
chance of leading him, — to see that 
a thing which he has always been used 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 55 

to look at from one side only, which 
he greatly values, and which, looked 
at from that side, quite deserves, per- 
haps, all the prizing and admiring 
which he bestows upon it, — that this 
thing, looked at from another side, 
may appear much less beneficent and 
beautiful, and yet retain all its claims 
to our practical allegiance. Where 
shall we find language innocent 
enough, how shall we make the 
spotless purity of our intentions evi- 
dent enough, to enable us to say to 
the political Englishman that the Brit- 
ish Constitution itself, which, seen 
from the practical side, looks such 
a magnificent organ of progress and 
virtue, seen from the speculative side, 
— with its compromises, its love of 
facts, its horror of theory, its studied 
avoidance of clear thoughts, — that, 



56 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

seen from this side, our august Con- 
stitution sometimes looks, — forgive 
me, shade of Lord Somers ! — a colos- 
sal machine for the manufacture of 
Philistines? How is Cobbett to say 
this and not be misunderstood, 
blackened as he is with the smoke 
of a lifelong conflict in the field of 
political practice? how is Mr. Carlyle 
to say it and not be misunderstood, 
after his furious raid into this field 
with his Latter-day Pamphlets ? how 
is Mr. Ruskin, after his pugnacious 
political economy? I say, the critic 
must keep out of the region of imme- 
diate practice in the political, social, 
humanitarian sphere, if he wants to 
make a beginning for that more free 
speculative treatment of things, which 
may perhaps one day make its bene- 
fits felt even in this sphere, but 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 57 

in a natural and thence irresistible 
manner. 

Do what he will, however, the critic 
will still remain exposed to frequent 
misunderstandings, and nowhere so 
much as in this country. For here 
people are particularly indisposed even 
to comprehend that without this free 
disinterested treatment of things, truth 
and the highest culture are out of the 
question. So immersed are they in 
practical life, so accustomed to take 
all their notions from this life and its 
processes, that they are apt to think 
that truth and culture themselves 
can be reached by the processes of 
this life, and that it is an imperti- 
nent singularity to think of reaching 
them in any other. "We are all 
terrce. filii,'" cries their eloquent ad- 
vocate; "all Philistines together. 



58 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

Away with the notion of proceeding 
by any other course than the course 
dear to the Philistines; let us have a 
social movement, let us organise and I 
combine a party to pursue truth and 
new thought, let us call it the liberal 
party, and let us all stick to each 
other, and back each other up. Let 
us have no nonsense about indepen- 
dent criticism, and intellectual deli- 
cacy, and the few and the many. 
Don't let us trouble ourselves about 
foreign thought; we shall invent the ^ 
whole thing for ourselves as we go 
along. \i one of us speaks well, ap- 
plaud him; if one of us speaks ill, 
applaud him too; we are all in the 
same movement, we are all liberals, 
we are all in pursuit of truth." In 
this way the pursuit of truth becomes 
really a social, practical, pleasurable 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 59 

affair, almost requiring a chairman, a 
secretary, and advertisements; with 
the excitement of an occasional scan- 
dal, with a little resistance to give the 
happy sense of difificulty overcome; 
but, in general, plenty of bustle and 
very little thought. To act is so easy, 
as Goethe says; to think is so hard! 
It is true that the critic has many 
temptations to go with the stream, to 
make one of the party movement, one 
of these terra filii ; it seems ungracious 
to refuse to be a terrce filius, when so 
many excellent people are; but the 
critic's duty is to refuse, or, if resist- 
ance is vain, at least to cry with Ober- 
mann : Perissons en resistant. 

How serious a matter it is to try and 
resist, I had ample opportunity of ex- 
periencing when I ventured some time 
ago to criticise the celebrated first 



6o THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

volume of Bishop Colenso.^ The 
echoes of the storm which was then 
raised I still, from time to time, hear 
grmnbling round me. That storm 
arose out of a misunderstanding al- 
most inevitable. It is a result of no 
little culture to attain to a clear percep- 
tion that science and religion are two 



1 So sincere is my dislike to all personal at- 
tack and controversy, that I abstain from reprint- 
ing, at this distance of time from the occasion 
which called them forth, the essays in which I 
criticised Dr, Colenso's book ; I feel bound, how- i 
ever, after all that has passed, to make here a ' 
final declaration of my sincere impenitence for 
having published them. Nay, I cannot forbear 
repeating yet once more, for his benefit and that 
of his readers, this sentence from my original re- 
marks upon him : There is truth of science a/7d 
truth of religion ; truth of science does not become 
truth of religion till it is made religious. And I I 
will add : Let us have all the science there is from I 
the men of science ; from the men of religion let 
us have religion. 



AT THE PRESENT TDIE. 6 1 

wholly different things. The multi- 
tude will for ever confuse them; but 
happily that is of no great real impor- 
tance, for while the multitude imag- 
ines itself to live by its false science, 
it does really live by its true religion. 
Dr. Colenso, however, in his first vol- 
ume did all he could to strengthen the 
confusion,^ and to make it dangerous. 
He did this with the best intentions, 
I freely admit, and with the most can- 
did ignorance that this was the natural 
effect of what he was doing; but, says 
Joubert, "Ignorance, which in mat- 
ters of morals extenuates the crime, is 
itself, in intellectual matters, a crime 
of the first order." I criticised Bishop 

1 It has been said I make it " a crime against 
literary criticism and the higher culture to at- 
tempt to inform the ignorant." Need I point 
out that the ignorant are not informed by being 
confirmed in a confusion? 



62 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

Colenso's speculative confusion. Im 
mediately there was a cry raised: 
"What is this? here is a liberal at- 
tacking a liberal. Do not you be- 
long to the movement? are not you 
a friend of truth? Is not Bishop Co- 
lenso in pursuit of truth? then speak 
with proper respect of his book. Dr. 
Stanley is another friend of truth, and 
you speak with proper respect of his 
book; why make these invidious dif- 
ferences? both books are excellent, 
admirable, liberal; Bishop Colenso's 
perhaps the most so, because it is the 
boldest, and will have the best prac- 
tical consequences for the liberal 
cause. Do you want to encourage to 
the attack of a brother liberal his, 
and your, and our implacable ene- 
mies, the Church and State Review 
or the Record^ — the High Church rhi- 



I 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 63 

noceros and the Evangelical hyaena? 
Be silent, therefore; or rather speak, 
speak as loud as ever you can! and 
go into ecstasies over the eighty and 
odd pigeons." 

But criticism cannot follow this 
coarse and indiscriminate method. 
It is unfortunately possible for a man 
in pursuit of truth to write a book 
which reposes upon a false concep- 
tion. Even the practical conse- 
quences of a book are to genuine 
criticism no recommendation of it, 
if the book is, in the highest sense, 
blundering. I see that a lady who 
herself, too, is in pursuit of truth, 
and who writes with great ability, 
but a little too much, perhaps, under 
the influence of the practical spirit of 
the English liberal movement, classes 
Bishop Colenso's book and M. Kenan's 



64 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

together, in her survey of the religious 
state of Europe, as facts of the same 
order, works, both of them, of "great 
importance;" "great ability, power, 
and skill;" Bishop Colenso's, per- 
haps, the most powerful; at least. 
Miss Cobbe gives special expression 
to her gratitude that to Bishop Co- 
lenso "has been given the strength 
to grasp, and the courage to teach, 
truths of such deep import." In the 
same way, more than one popular 
writer has compared him to Luther. 
Now it is just this kind of false esti- 
mate which the critical spirit is, it 
seems to me, bound to resist. It is 
/ really the strongest possible proof of 
the low ebb at which, in England, 
the critical spirit is, that while the 
critical hit in the religious literature 
of Germany is Dr. Strauss' s book, in 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 65 

that of France M. Kenan's book, the 
book of Bishop Colenso is the critical 
hit in the religious literature of Eng- 
land. Bishop Colenso' s book reposes 
on a total misconception of the essen- 
tial elements of the religious problem, 
as that problem is now presented for 
solution. To criticism, therefore, 
which seeks to have the best that is 
known and thought on this problem, 
it is, however well meant, of no im- 
portance whatever. M. Kenan's book 
attempts a new synthesis of the ele- 
ments furnished to us by the Four 
Gospels. It attempts, in my opinion, 
a synthesis, perhaps premature, per- 
haps impossible, certainly not success- 
ful. Up to the present time, at any 
rate, we must acquiesce in Fleury's 
sentence on such recastings of the 
Gospel-story: Quiconque s' imagine la 

F 



66 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISIM 

poiivoir viieux ecrire, ne V entend pas. 
M. Renan had himself passed by an- 
ticipation a like sentence on his own 
work, when he said : " If a new pres- 
entation of the character of Jesus were 
offered to me, I would not have it; its 
very clearness would be, in my opin- 
ion, the best proof of its insufficiency." 
His friends may with perfect justice 
rejoin that at the sight of the Holy 
Land, and of the actual scene of the 
Gospel-story, all the current of M. 
Renan 's thoughts may have naturally 
changed, and a new casting of that 
story irresistibly suggested itself to 
him; and that this is just a case for 
applying Cicero's maxim: Change of 
mind is not inconsistency — nemo doc- 
tus unquam mtctationem coiisilii iiicort- 
siantia?n dixit esse. Nevertheless, for 
criticism, M. Renan' s first thought 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 67 

must Still be the truer one, as long as 
his new casting so fails more fully to 
commend itself, more fully (to use 
Coleridge's happy phrase about the 
Bible) to find us. Still M. Renan's 
attempt is, for criticism, of the most 
real interest and importance, since, 
with all its difficulty, a fresh synthesis of 
the New Testament data, — not a mak- 
ing war on them, in Voltaire's fashion, 
not a leaving them out of mind, in the 
world's fashion, but the putting a new 
construction upon them, the taking 
them from under the old, traditional, 
conventional point of view and plac- 
ing them under a new one, — is the 
very essence of the religious problem, 
as now presented; and only by efforts 
in this direction can it receive a solu- 
tion. 

Again, in the same spirit in which 



68 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

she judges Bishop Colenso, Miss 
Cobbe, like so many earnest liberals 
of our practical race, both here and in 
America, herself sets vigorously about 
a positive reconstruction of religion, 
about making a religion of the future 
out of hand, or at least setting about 
making it. We must not rest, she and 
they are always thinking and saying, 
in negative criticism, we must be 
creative and constructive; hence we 
have such works as her recent Relig- 
ions Duty, and works still more con- 
siderable, perhaps, by others, which 
will be in every one's mind. These 
works often have much ability; they 
often spring out of sincere convic- 
tions, and a sincere wish to do good; 
and they sometimes, perhaps, do good. 
Their fault is (if I may be permitted 
to say so) one which they have in 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 69 

common with the British College of 
Health, in the New Road. Every 
one knows the British College of 
Health; it is that building with the 
lion and the statue of the Goddess 
Hygeia before it; at least I am sure 
about the lion, though I am not ab- 
solutely certain about the Goddess 
Hygeia. This building does credit, 
perhaps, to the resources of Dr. 
Morrison and his disciples; but it 
falls a good deal short of one's idea 
of what a British College of Health 
ought to be. In England, where we 
hate public interference and love in- 
dividual enterprise, we have a whole 
crop of places like the British College 
of Health; the grand name without 
the grand thing. Unluckily, credit- 
able to individual enterprise as they 
are, they tend to impair our taste by 



70 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

making us forget what more grandiose, 
noble, or beautiful character properly 
belongs to a public institution. The 
same may be said of the religions of \ 
the future of Miss Cobbe and others. 
Creditable, like the British College of ' 
Health, to the resources of their au- 
thors, they yet tend to make us forget 
what more grandiose, noble, or beauti- 
ful character properly belongs to re- 
ligious constructions. The historic 
religions, with all their faults, have had 
this; it certainly belongs to the relig- 
ious sentiment, when it truly flowers, 
to have this; and we impoverish our 
spirit if we allow a religion of the fut- i 
ure without it. What then is the duty 
of criticism here? To take the prac- f 
tical point of view, to applaud the 
liberal movement and all its works, — 
its New Road religions of the future 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 7 1 

into the bargain, — for their general 
utility's sake? By no means; but to 
be perpetually dissatisfied with these 
works, while they perpetually fall short 
of a high and perfect ideal. 

For criticism, these are elementary 
laws; but they never can be popular, 
and in this country they have been 
very little followed, and one meets 
with immense obstacles in following 
them. That is a reason for asserting 
them again and again. Criticism 
must maintain its independence of 
the practical spirit and its aims. 
Even with well-meant efforts of the 
practical spirit it must express dis- 
satisfaction, if in the sphere of the 
ideal they seem impoverishing and 
limiting. It must not hurry on to the 
goal because of its practical impor- 
tance. It must be patient, and know 



72 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

how to wait; and flexible, and know 
how to attach itself to things and how 
to withdraw from them. It must be 
apt to study and praise elements that 
for the fulness of spiritual perfection 
are wanted, even though they belong 
to a power which in the practical 
sphere may be maleficent. It must 
be apt to discern the spiritual short- 
comings or illusions of powers that in 
the practical sphere may be benefi- 
cent. And this without any notion 
of favouring or injuring, in the prac- 
tical sphere, one power or the other; 
without any notion of playing off, in 
this sphere, one power against the 
other. When one looks, for instance, 
at the English Divorce Court, — an 
institution which perhaps has its 
practical conveniences, but which in 
the ideal sphere is so hideous; an 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 73 

institution which neither makes di- 
vorce impossible nor makes it decent, 
which allows a man to get rid of his 
wife, or a wife of her husband, but 
makes them drag one another first, 
for the public edification, through a 
mire of unutterable infamy, — when 
one looks at this charming institution, 
I say, with its crowded trials, its news- 
paper reports, and its money compen- 
sations, this institution in which the 
gross unregenerate British Philistine 
has indeed stamped an image of him- 
self, — one may be permitted to find 
the marriage theory of Catholicism 
refreshing and elevating. Or when 
Protestantism, in virtue of its sup- 
posed rational and intellectual origin, 
gives the law to criticism too mag- 
isterially, criticism may and must 
remind it that its pretensions, in 



74 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

this respect, are illusive and do it 
harm; that the Reformation was a 
moral rather than an intellectual event; 
that Luther's theory of grace no more 
exactly reflects the mind of the spirit 
than Bossuet's philosophy of history 
reflects it; and that there is no more 
antecedent probability of the Bishop 
of Durham's stock of ideas being 
agreeable to perfect reason than of 
Pope Pius the Ninth's. But criticism 
will not on that account forget the 
achievements of Protestantism in the 
practical and moral sphere; nor that, 
even in the intellectual sphere, Prot- 
estantism, though in a blind and 
stumbling manner, carried forward the 
Renascence, while Catholicism threw 
itself violently across its path. 

I lately heard a man of thought and 
energy contrasting the want of ardour 



ii 



( 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 75 

and movement which he now found 
amongst young men in this country 
with what he remembered in his own 
youth, twenty years ago. "What re- 
formers we were then ! " he exclaimed; 
" what a zeal we had ! how we can- 
vassed every institution in Church and 
State, and were prepared to remodel 
them all on first principles ! " He was 
inclined to regret, as a spiritual flag- 
ging, the lull which he saw. I am 
disposed rather to regard it as a pause 
in which the turn to a new mode of 
spiritual progress is being accom- 
plished. Everything was long seen, 
by the young and ardent amongst us, 
in inseparable connection with poli- 
tics and practical life. We have 
pretty well exhausted the benefits of 
seeing things in this connection, we 
have got all that can be got by so see- 



76 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

ing them. Let us try a more disin- 
terested mode of seeing them; let us 
betake ourselves more to the serener 
life of the mind and spirit. This life, 
too, may have its excesses and dan- 
gers; but they are not for us at pres- 
ent. Let us think of quietly enlarging 
our stock of true and fresh ideas, and 
not, as soon as we get an idea or half 
an idea, be running out with it into 
the street, and trying to make it rule 
there. Our ideas will, in the end, 
shape the world all the better for ma- 
turing a little. Perhaps in fifty years' 
time it will in the English House of 
Commons be an objection to an insti- 
tution that it is an anomaly, and my 
friend the Member of Parliament will 
shudder in his grave. But let us in 
the meanwhile rather endeavour that 
in twenty years' time it may, in Eng- 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 77 

lish literature, be an objection to a 
proposition that it is absurd. That 
will be a change so vast, that the im- 
agination almost fails to grasp it. Ab 
integro scEcloruni nascitiir ordo. 

If I have insisted so much on the 
course which criticism must take where 
politics and religion are concerned, it 
is because, where these burning mat- 
ters are in question, it is most likely 
to go astray. I have wished, above 
all, to insist on the attitude which 
criticism should adopt towards things 
in general; on its right tone and tem- 
per of mind. But then comes another 
question as to the subject-matter which 
literary criticism should most seek. 
Here, in general, its course is deter- 
mined for it by the idea which is the 
law of its being; the idea of a disin- 
terested endeavour to learn and prop- 



78 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM » 

agate the best that is known and 
thought in the world, and thus to es- .- 
tablish a current of fresh and true I 
ideas. By the very nature of things, 
as England is not ail the world, much 
of the best that is known and thought 
in the world cannot be of English 
growth, must be foreign; by the nat- 
ure of things, again, it is just this 
that we are least likely to know, while 
English thought is streaming in upon 
us from all sides, and takes excellent 
care that we shall not be ignorant of 
its existence. The English critic of 
literature, therefore, must dwell much 
on foreign thought, and with particu- 
lar heed on any part of it, which, 
while significant and fruitful in itself, 
is for any reason specially likely to 
escape him. Again, judging is often 
spoken of as the critic's one business, 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 79 

and so in some sense it is; but the 
judgment which almost insensibly 
forms itself in a fair and clear mind, 
along with fresh knowledge, is the val- 
uable one; and thus knowledge, and 
ever fresh knowledge, must be the 
critic's great concern for himself. And 
it is by communicating fresh knowl- 
edge, and letting his own judgment 
pass along with it, — but insensibly, 
and in the second place, not the first, 
as a sort of companion and clue, not 
as an abstract lawgiver, — that the 
critic will generally do most good to 
his readers. Sometimes, no doubt, for 
the sake of establishing an author's 
place in literature, and his relation to 
a central standard (and if this is not 
done, how are we to get at our best in 
the world ?) criticism may have to deal 
with a subject-matter so familiar that 



80 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

fresh knowledge is out of the question, 
and then it must be all judgment; an 
enunciation and detailed application 
of principles. Here the great safe- 
guard is never to let oneself become 
abstract, always to retain an intimate 
and lively consciousness of the truth 
of what one is saying, and, the moment 
this fails us, to be sure that something 
is wrong. Still, under all circum- 
stances, this mere judgment and ap- 
plication of principles is, in itself, 
not the most satisfactory work to the 
critic; like mathematics, it is tauto- 
logical, and cannot well give us, like 
fresh learning, the sense of creative 
activity. 

But stop, some one will say; all this 
talk is of no practical use to us what- 
ever; this criticism of yours is not 
what we have in our minds when we 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 8 1 

speak of criticism; when we speak 
of critics and criticism, we mean 
critics and criticism of the current 
English literature of the day; when 
you offer to tell criticism its function, 
it is to this criticism that we expect 
you to address yourself. I am sorry 
for it, for I am afraid I must disap- 
point these expectations. I am bound 
by my own definition of criticism : a 
disinterested endeavoiLr to learn and 
pi'opagate the best that is knoivn and 
thought in the world. How much of 
current English literature comes into 
this " best that is known and thought in 
the world?" Not very much, I fear; 
certainly less, at this moment, than of 
the current literature of France or 
Germany. Well, then, am I to alter 
my definition of criticism, in order to 
meet the requirements of a number of 

G 



82 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

practising English critics, who, after 
all, are free in their choice of a busi- 
ness? That would be making criti- 
cism lend itself just to one of those 
alien practical considerations, which, 
I have said, are so fatal to it. One 
may say, indeed, to those who have to 
deal with the mass — so much better 
disregarded — of current English lit- 
erature, that they may at all events 
endeavour, in dealing with this, to try 
it, so far as they can, by the standard 
of the best that is known and thought 
in the world; one may say, that to get 
anywhere near this standard, every 
critic should try and possess one great 
literature, at least, besides his own; 
and the more unlike his own, the bet- 
ter. But, after all, the criticism I am 
really concerned with, — the criticism 
which alone can much help us for the 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 8;^ 

future, the criticism which, through- 
out Europe, is at the present day 
meant, when so much stress is laid 
on the importance of criticism and the 
critical spirit, — is a criticism which 
regards Europe as being, for intellect- 
ual and spiritual purposes, one great 
confederation, bound to a joint action 
and working to a common result; and 
whose members have, for their proper 
outfit, a knowledge of Greek, Roman, 
and Eastern antiquity, and of one an- 
other. Special, local, and temporary 
advantages being put out of account, 
that modern nation will in the intellect- 
ual and spiritual sphere make most prog- 
ress, which most thoroughly carries out 
this programme. And what is that but \ 
saying that we too, all of us, as individ- 
uals, the more thoroughly we carry it 
out, shall make the more progress? 



84 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 

There is so much inviting us! — 
what are we to take ? what will nourish 
us in growth towards perfection? 
That is the question which, with^the 
immense field of life and of literature 
lying before him, the critic has to 
answer; for himself first, and after- 
wards for others. In this idea of th^ 
critic's business the essays brought 
together in the following pages have 
had their origin; in this idea, widely 
different as are their subjects, they 
have, perhaps, their unity. 

■ I conclude with.what I said at the 
beginning: to have*'fhe sense of crea- 
tive activity is the great happiness and 
the great proof of being alive, and it 
is not denied to criticism to have it; 
but then criticism must be sincere, 
simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening 
its knowledge. Then it may have, 



AT THE PRESENT TIME. 85 

in no contemptible measure, a joy- 
ful sense of creative activity; a 
sense which a man of insight and 
conscience will prefer to what he 
might derive from a poor, starved, frag- 
mentary, inadequate creation. And 
at some epochs no other creation is 
possible. 

Still, in full measure, the sense of 
creative activity belongs only to gen- 
uine creation; in literature we must 
never forget that. But what true man 
of letters ever can forget it ? It is no 
such common matter for a gifted nat- 
ure to come into possession of a cur- 
rent of true and living ideas, and to 
produce amidst the inspiration of them, 
that we are likely to underrate it. 
The epochs of ^schylus and Shak- 
speare make us feel their pre-emi- 
nence. In an epoch like those is, no 



86 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM. 

doubt, the true life of literature; there 
is the promised land, towards which 
criticism can only beckon. That prom- 
ised land it will not be ours to enter, 
and we shall die in the wilderness : but 
to have desired to enter it, to have 
saluted it from afar, is already, per- 
haps, the best distinction among con- 
temporaries; it will certainly be the 
best title to esteem with posterity. 



II. 

STYLE. 



I 
t 



I 

I 



II. 

STYLE. 

QINCE all progress of mind consists 
^ for the most part in differentia- 
tion, in the resolution of an obscure 
and complex object into its compo- 
nent aspects, it is surely the stupidest 
of losses to confuse things which right 
reason has put asunder, to lose the 
sense of achieved distinctions, the dis- 
tinction between poetry and prose, for 
instance, or, to speak more exactly, 
between the laws and characteristic 
excellences of verse and prose com- 
position. On the other hand, those 
who have dwelt most emphatically on 
the distinction between prose and 

89 



90 STYLE. 

verse, prose and poetry, may some- 
times have been tempted to limit the 
proper functions of prose too nar- 
rowly; and this again is at least false 
economy, as being, in effect, the re- 
nunciation of a certain means or fac- 
ulty, in a world where after all we must 
needs make the most of things. Crit- 
ical efforts to limit art a priori, by 
anticipations regarding the natural 
incapacity of the material with which 
this or that artist works, as the sculp- 
tor with solid form, or the prose- 
writer with the ordinary language of 
men, are always liable to be discred- 
ited by the facts of artistic produc- 
tion; and while prose is actually found 
to be a coloured thing with Bacon, 
picturesque with Livy and Carlyle, 
musical with Cicero and Newman, 
mystical and intimate with Plato and 



STYLE. 



91 



Michelet and Sir Thomas Browne, 
exalted or florid, it may be, with Mil- 
ton and Taylor, it will be useless to 
protest that it can be nothing at all, 
except something very tamely and 
narrowly confined to mainly practi- 
cal ends — a kind of "good round- 
hand;" as useless as the protest that 
poetry might not touch prosaic sub- 
jects as with Wordsworth, or an ab- 
struse matter as with Browning, or 
treat contemporary life nobly as with 
Tennyson. In subordination to one 
essential beauty in all good literary 
style, in all literature as a fine art, as 
there are many beauties of poetry so 
the beauties of prose are many, and 
it is the business of criticism to esti- 
mate them as such; as it is good in 
the criticism of verse to look for those 
hard, logical, and quasi-prosaic excel- 



92 STYLE. 

lences which that too has, or needs. 
To find in the poem, amid the flowers, 
the allusions, the mixed perspectives, 
of Lycidas for instance, the thought, 
the logical structure : — how whole- 
some ! how delightful ! as to identify- 
in prose what we call the poetry, the 
imaginative power, not treating it as 
out of place and a kind of vagrant 
intruder, but by way of an estimate 
of its rights, that is, of its achieved 
powers, there. 

Dryden, with the characteristic in- 
stinct of his age, loved to emphasise 
the distinction between poetry and 
prose, the protest against their con- 
fusion with each other, coming with 
somewhat diminished effect from one 
whose poetry was so prosaic. In 
truth, his sense of prosaic excellence 
affected his verse rather than his prose, 



STYLE. 93 

which is not only fervid, richly fig- 
ured, poetic, as we say, but vitiated, 
all unconsciously, by many a scanning 
line. Setting up correctness, that 
humble merit of prose, as the cen- 
tral literary excellence, he is really a 
less correct writer than he may seem, 
still with an imperfect mastery of the 
relative pronoun. It might have been 
foreseen that, in the rotations of mind, 
the province of poetry in prose would 
find its assertor; and, a century after 
Dryden, amid very different intellect- 
ual needs, and with the need therefore 
of great modifications in literary form, 
the range of the poetic force in liter- 
ature was effectively enlarged by 
Wordsworth. The true distinction 
between prose and poetry he regarded 
as the almost technical or accidental 
one of the absence or presence of 



94 STYLE. 

metrical beauty, or, say ! metrical re- 
straint; and for him the opposition 
came to be between verse and prose 
of course; but, as the essential dichot- 
omy in this matter, between imagi- 
native and unimaginative writing, 
parallel to De Quincey's distinction 
between "the literature of power and 
the literature of knowledge," in the 
former of which the composer gives 
us not fact, but his peculiar sense of 
fact, whether past or present. 

Dismissing then, under sanction of 
Wordsworth, that harsher opposition 
of poetry to prose, as savouring in 
fact of the arbitrary psychology of 
the last century, and with it the prej- 
udice that there can be but one only 
beauty of prose style, I propose here 
to point out certain qualities of all 
literature as a fine art, which, if they 



STYLE. 95 

apply to the literature of fact, apply 
still more to the literature of the im- 
aginative sense of fact, while they 
apply indifferently to verse and prose, 
so far as either is really imaginative — 
certain conditions of true art in both 
alike, which conditions may also con- 
tain in them the secret of the proper 
discrimination and guardianship of 
the peculiar excellences of either. 

The line between fact and some- 
thing quite different from external 
fact is, indeed, hard to draw. In , 
Pascal, for instance, in the persuasive 
writers generally, how difficult to de- 
fine the point where, from time to 
time, argument which, if it is to be 
worth anything at all, must consist of 
facts or groups of facts, becomes a 
pleading — a theorem no longer, but 
essentially an appeal to the reader to 



g6 STYLE. 

\ catch the writer's spirit, to think with 
him, if one can or will — an expres- 
sion no longer of fact but of his sense 
of it, his peculiar intuition of a world, 
prospective, or discerned below the 
faulty conditions of the present, in 
either case changed somewhat from 
the actual world. In science, on the 
other hand, in history so far as it con- 
forms to scientific rule, we have a lit- 
erary domain where the imagination 
may be thought to be always an in- 
truder. And as, in all science, the 
functions of literature reduce them- 
selves eventually to the transcribing 
of fact, so all the excellences of lit- 
erary form in regard to science are 
reducible to various kinds of painstak- 
ing; this good quality being involved 
in all "skilled work" whatever, in the 
drafting of an act of parliament, as in 



STYLE. 97 

sewing. Yet here again, the writer's 
sense of fact, in history especially, and 
in all those complex subjects which do 
but lie on the borders of science, will 
still take the place of fact, in various 
degrees. Your historian, for instance, 
with absolutely truthful intention, amid 
the multitude of facts presented to him 
must needs select, and in selecting as- 
sert something of his own humour, 
something that comes not of the world 
without but of a vision within. So 
Gibbon moulds his unwieldy material 
to a preconceived view. Livy, Taci- 
tus, Michelet, moving full of poignant 
sensibility amid the records of the 
past, each, after his own sense, mod- 
ifies — who can tell where and to what 
degree ? — and becomes something else 
than a transcriber; each, as he thus 
modifies, passing into the domain of 

H 



98 STYLE. 

art proper. For just in proportion as 
the writer's aim, consciously or uncon- 
sciously, comes to be the transcrib- 
ing, not of the world, not of mere fact, 
but of his sense of it, he becomes an 
artist, his work fine art ; and good 

\art (as I hope ultimately to show) in I 
proportion to the truth of his present- 
ment of that sense ; as in those hum- 
bler or plainer functions of literature 
also, truth — truth to bare fact, there 
— is the essence of such artistic qual- 
ity as they may have. Truth ! there 
can be no merit, no craft at all, with- 
^._ out that. And further, all beauty is 
• in the long run only fineness of truth, 
or what we call expression, the finer 
accommodation of speech to that 
vision within. 

— The transcript of his sense of fact 
rather than the fact, as being prefer- 



ST\'LE. 99 

able, pleasanter, more beautiful to the 
writer himself. In literature, as in 
every other product of human skill, in 
the moulding of a bell or a platter for 
instance, wherever this sense asserts 
itself, wherever the producer so mod- 
ifies his work as, over and above its 
primary use or intention, to make it 
pleasing (to himself, of course, in the 
first instance) there, "fine " as opposed 
to merely serviceable art, exists. Lit- 
erary art, that is, like all art which is 
in any way imitative or reproductive 
of fact — form, or colour, or incident 
— is the representation of such fact as 
connected with soul, of a specific per- 
sonality, in its preferences, its volition 
and power. 

Sach is the matter of imaginative 
or artistic literature — this transcript, 
not of mere fact, but of fact in its infi- 



lOO STYLE. 

nite variety, as modified by human 
preference in all its infinitely varied 
forms. It will be good literary art 
not because it is brilliant or sober, or 
rich, or impulsive, or severe, but just 
in proportion as its representation of 
that sense, that soul- fact, is true, verse 
being only one department of such lit- 
erature, and imaginative prose, it may 
be thought, being the special art of the 
m,odern world. That imaginative prose 
should be the special and opportune 
art of the modern world results from 
two important facts about the latter: 
first, the chaotic variety and complex- 
ity of its interests, making the intel- 
lectual issue, the really master currents 
of the present time incalculable — a 
condition of mind little susceptible of 
the restraint proper to verse form, so 
that the most characteristic verse of 



STYLE. lOI 

the nineteenth century has been law- 
less verse; and secondly, an all-per- 
/ vading naturalism, a curiosity about 
everything whatever as it really is, in- 
volving a certain humility of attitude, 
cognate to what must, after all, be the 
less ambitious form of literature. And 
prose thus asserting itself as the special 
and privileged artistic faculty of the 
present day, will be, however critics 
may try to narrow its scope, as varied in 
its excellence as humanity itself reflect- 
ing on the facts of its latest experi- 
ence — an instrument of many stops, 
meditative, observant, descriptive, 
eloquent, analytic, plaintive, fervid. 
Its beauties will be not exclusively 
"pedestrian": it will exert, in due 
measure, all the varied charms of 
poetry, down to the rhythm which, 
as in Cicero, or Michelet, or Newman, 



I 



1 02 ST\'LE. 

at their best, gives its musical value 
to every syllable.-^ 

The literary artist is of necessity a 
scholar, and in what he proposes to do 
will have in mind, first of all, the 
scholar and the scholarly conscience 
— the male conscience in this matter, 
as we must think it, under a system of 
education which still to so large an 
extent limits real scholarship to men.. 
In his self-criticism, he supposes al-U 

1 Mr. Saintsbury, in his Specimens of English 
Prose, from Malory to Macaulay, has succeeded 
in tracing, through successive English prose- 
writers, the tradition of that severer beauty in 
them, of which this admirable scholar of our 
literature is known to be a lover. English Prose, 
from Mandeville to Thackeray, more recently 
" chosen and edited " by a younger scholar, Mr. 
Arthur Galton, of New College, Oxford, a lover 
of our literature at once enthusiastic and discreet, 
aims at a more various illustration of the eloquent 
powers of English prose, and is a delightful com- 
panion. 



STYLE. 103 

ways that sort of reader who will go 
(full of eyes) warily, considerately, 
though without consideration for him, 
over the ground which the female con- 
science traverses so lightly, so ami- 
ably. For the material in which he 
worksjs_no more a creation of his own 
than th£scul£tor' s marble. Product 
of a myriad various minds and con- 
tending tongues, compact of obscure 
and minute association, a language 
has its own abundant and often recon- 
dite laws, in the habitual and summary 
recognition of which scholarship con- 
sists. A writer, full of a matter he is 
before all things anxious to express, 
may think of those laws, the limita- 
tions of vocabulary, structure, and the 
like, as a restriction, but if a real ar- 
tist will find in them an opportunity. 
His punctilious observance of the pro- 



") 



104 STYLE. 

prieties of his medium will diffuse ' 
through all he writes a general air 
of sensibility, of refined usage. Ex- ' 
clusiones debitce natu7'ce — the exclu- ■ 
sions, or rejections, which nature 
demands — we know how large a part 
these play, according to Bacon, in the 
science of nature. In a somewhat 
changed sense, we might say that the 
art of the scholar is summed up in 
the observance of those rejections 
demanded by the nature of his me- 
dium, the material he must use. Alive 
to the value of an atmosphere in which : 
every term finds its utmost degree of 
expression, and with all the jealousy 
of a lover of words, he will resist a ' 
constant tendency on the part of the 
majority of those who use them to ' 
efface the distinctions of language, the 
facility of writers often reinforcing in 



STYLE. 105 

this respect the work of the vulgar. 
He will feel the obligation not of the 
laws only, but of those affinities, avoid- 
ances, those mere preferences, of his 
language, which through' the associa- 
tions of literary history have become 
a part of its nature, prescribing the re- 
jection of many a neology, many a 
license, many a gipsy phrase which 
might present itself as actually expres- 
sive. His appeal, again, is to the 
scholar, who has great experience in 
literature, and will show no favour to 
short-cuts, or hackneyed illustration, 
or an affectation of learning designed 
for the unlearned. Hence a conten- 
tion, a sense of self-restraint and re- 
nunciation, having for the susceptible 
reader the effect of a challenge for 
minute consideration; the attention 
of the writer, in every minutest detail, 



I06 STYLE. 

being a pledge that it is worth the 
reader's while to be attentive too, that 
the writer is dealing scrupulously with 
his instrument, and therefore, indi- 
rectly, with the reader himself also, 
that he has the science of the instru- 
ment he plays on, perhaps, after all, 
with a freedom which in such case will 
be the freedom of a master. 

For meanwhile, braced only by those 
restraints, he is really vindicating his 
liberty in the making of a vocabulary, 
an entire system of composition, for 
himself, his own true manner; and 
when we speak of the manner of a 
true master we mean what is essential 
in his art. Pedantry being only the 
scholarship of le aiistre (we have no 
English equivalent) he is no pedant, 
and does but show his intelligence of 
the rules of language in his freedoms U 



STYLE. 107 

with it, addition or expansion, which 
like the spontaneities of manner in 
a well-bred person will still further 
illustrate good taste. — The right vo- 
Icabulary! Translators have not inva- 
riably seen how all-important that is in 
the work of translation, driving for 
the most part an idiom or construc- 
tion; whereas, if the original be first- 
rate, one's first care should be with its 
elementary particles, Plato, for in- 
stance, being often reproducible by 
an exact following, with no variation 
in structure, of word after word, as 
the pencil follows a drawing under 
tracing-paper, so only each word or 
syllable be not of false colour, to 
change my illustration a little. 

Well ! that is because any writer 
worth translating at all has winnowed 
and searched through his vocabulary, 



I08 STYLE. 

is conscious of the words he would se- 
lect in systematic reading of a diction- 
ary, and still more of the words he 
would reject were the dictionary other 
than Johnson's; and doing this with 
his peculiar sense of the world ever 
in view, in search of an instrument 
for the adequate expression of that, 
he begets a vocabulary faithful to the 
^J colouring of his own spirit, and in the 
strictest sense original. That living 
authority which language needs lies, 
in truth, in its scholars, who recog- 
nising always that every language pos- 
sesses a genius, a very fastidious genius, 
of its own, expand at once and purify 
its very elements, which must needs 
change along with the changing 
thoughts of living people. Ninety 
years ago, for instance, great mental 
force, certainly, was needed by Words- 



ST\^LE. 109 

worth, to break through the conse- 
crated poetic associations of a century, 
and speak the language that was his, 
that was to become in a measure the 
language of the next generation. But 
he did it with the tact of a scholar 
also. English, for a quarter of a cent- 
ury past, has been assimilating the 
phraseology of pictorial art; for half 
a century, the phraseology of the great 
German metaphysical movement of 
eighty years ago; in part also the 
language of mystical theology : and 
none but pedants will regret a great 
consequent increase of its resources. 
For many years to come its enterprise 
may well lie in the naturalisation 
of the vocabulary of science, so only 
it be under the eve of a sensitive 
scholarship — in a liberal naturalisa- 
tion of the ideas of science too, for 



no STYLE. 

after all the chief stimulus of good 
style is to possess a full, rich, complex 
matter to grapple with. The literary- 
artist, therefore, will be well aware 
of physical science; science also at- 
taining, in its turn, its true literary 
ideal. And then, as the scholar is 
nothing without the historic sense, he 
will be apt to restore not really obso- 
lete or really worn-out words, but the 
finer edge of words still in use : ascer- 
tain, co7nmunicate, discover — words 
like these it has been part of our 
"business" to misuse. And still, as 
language was made for man, he will 
be no authority for correctnesses which, 
limiting freedom of utterance, were 
yet but accidents in their origin; as 
if one vowed not to say "//)'," which 
ought to have been in Shakspeare; 
"///i'" and ^^hers,'' for inanimate ob- 



STYLE. Ill 

jects, being but a barbarous and really 
inexpressive survival. Yet we have 
known many things like this. Racy 
Saxon monosyllables, close to us as 
touch and sight, he will intermix 
readily with those long, savoursome, 
Latin words, rich in "second inten- 
tion." In this late day certainly, no 
critical process can be conducted 
reasonably without eclecticism. Of 
such eclecticism we have a justifying 
example in one of the first poets of our 
time. How illustrative of monosyl- 
labic effect, of sonorous Latin, of the 
phraseology of science, of metaphysic, 
of colloquialism even, are the writings 
of Tennyson; yet with what a fine, 
fastidious scholarship throughout ! 

A scholar writing for the scholarly, 
he will of course leave something to 
the willing intelligence of his reader. 



112 - STYLE. 

"To go preach to the first passer-by," 
says Montaigne, "to become tutor to 
the ignorance of the first I meet, is a 
thing I abhor;" a thing, in fact, nat- 
urally distressing to the scholar, who 
will therefore ever be shy of offering 
uncomplimentary assistance to the 
reader's wit. To really strenuous \ 
minds there is a pleasurable stimulus / 
in the challenge for a continuous effort 
on their part, to be rewarded by securer 
and more intimate grasp of the author's 
sense. Self-restraint, a skilful econ- 
omy of means, ascesis, that too has a . 
beauty of its own; and for the reader ' 
supposed there will be an aesthetic sat- 
isfaction in that frugal closeness of 
style which makes the most of a word, 
in the exaction from every sentence of 
a precise relief, in the just spacing out 
of word to thought, in the logically 



STYLE. 113 

filled space connected always with the 
delightful sense of difficulty overcome. 
Different classes of persons, at dif- 
ferent times, make, of course, very 
various demands upon literature. Still, 
scholars, I suppose, and not only schol- 
ars, but all disinterested lovers of 
books, will always look to it, as to 
all other fine art, for a refuge, a sort 
of cloistral refuge, from a certain vul- 
garity in the actual world. A perfect 
poem like Lycidas, a perfect fiction 
like Esmond, the perfect handling of 
a theory like Newman's Idea of a 
University, has for them something of 
the uses of a religious " retreat. " Here, 
then, with a view to the central need 
of a select few, those " men of a finer 
thread " who have formed and maintain 
the literary ideal, everything, every 
component element, will have under- 
I 



114 STYLE. 

gone exact trial, and, above all, there 
will be no uncharacteristic or tarnished 
or vulgar decoration, permissible orna- 
ment being for the most part structural, 
or necessary. As the painter in his 
picture, so the artist in his book, aims 
at the production by honourable arti- 
fice of a peculiar atmosphere. "The 
artist," says Schiller, "may be known 
rather by what he omits " / and in 
literature, too, the true artist may be 
best recognised by his tact of omis- 
sion. For to the grave reader words 
too are grave; and the ornamental 
word, the figure, the accessory form 
or colour or reference, is rarely con- 
tent to die to thought precisely at the 
right moment, but will inevitably lin- 
ger awhile, stirring a long "brain- 
wave " behind it of perhaps quite 
alien associations. 



STYLE. 115 

Just there, it may be, is the detri- 
mental tendency of the sort of schol- 
arly attentiveness of mind I am rec- 
ommending. But the true artist 
allows for it. He will remember 
that, as the very word ornament indi- 
cates what is in itself non-essential, 
so the "one beauty" of all literary 
style is of its very essence, and inde- 
pendent, in prose and verse alike, of 
all removable decoration; that it may 
exist in its fullest lustre, as in Plau- 
bert's Madame B ovary, for instance, 
or in Stendhal's Le Rouge et Le Noii-, 
in a composition utterly unadorned, 
v/ith hardly a single suggestion of vis- 
ibly beautiful things. Parallel, allu- 
sion, the allusive w-ay generally, the 
flowers in the garden : — he knows the 
narcotic force of these upon the negli- 
gent intelligence to which any diver- 



Il6 STYLE. 

sion, literally, is welcome, any vagrant 
intruder, because one can go wander- 
ing away with it from the immediate 
subject. Jealous, if he have a really 
quickening motive within, of all that 
does not hold directly to that, of the 
facile, the otiose, he will never depart 
from the strictly pedestrian process, 
unless he gains a ponderable some- 
thing thereby. Even assured of its 
congruity, he will still question its 
serviceableness. Is it worth while, 
can we afford, to attend to just that, 
to just that iigure or literary reference, 
just then? — Surplus"age ! he will dread 
that, as the runner on his muscles. 
For in truth all art does but consist in 
the removal of surplusage, from the 
last finish of the gem-engraver blow- 
ing away the last particle of invisible 
dust, back to the earliest divination of 



STYLE. 117 

the finished work to be, lying some- 
where, according to Michelangelo's 
fancy, in the rough-hewn block of 
stone. 

And what applies to figure or flower 
must be understood of all other acci- 
dental or removable ornaments of 
writing whatever; and not of specific 
ornament only, but of all that latent 
colour and imagery which language as 
such carries in it. A lover of words 
for their own sake, to whom nothing 
about them is unimportant, a minute 
and constant observer of their physi- 
ognomy, he will be on the alert not 
only for obviously mixed metaphors of 
course, but for the metaphor that is 
mixed in all our speech, though a rapid 
use may involve no cognition of it. 
Currently recognising the incident, 
the colour, the physical elements or 



Il8 STYLE. 

particles in words like absoi'b, con- 
sidei', extract, to take the first that 
occur, he will avail himself of them, 
as further adding to the resources of 
expression. The elementary particles 
of language will be realised as colour 
and light and shade through his schol- 
arly living in the full sense of them. 
Still opposing the constant degrada- 
tion of language by those who use it 
carelessly, he will not treat coloured 
glass as if it were clear; and while 
half the world is using figure uncon- 
sciously, will be fully aware not only 
of all that latent figurative texture in 
speech, but of the vague, lazy, half- 
formed personification — a rhetoric, 
depressing, and worse than nothing, 
because it has no really rhetorical 
motive — which plays so large a part 
there, and, as in the case of more 



STYLE. 119 

ostentatious ornament, scrupulously 
exact of it, from syllable to syllable, 
its precise value. 

So far I have been speaking of cer- 
tain conditions_of the literary_axtaris- 
ing out of the mediuni-oj:_jii^terial..,m 
or upon which it works, the essential 
-qualities of language and its aptitudes 
for contingent ornamentation, matters 
which define scholarship as science and, 
good ta ste re spectively. They are both 
subservient to a more intimate quality 
of good style : more intimate, as com- 
ing nearer to the artist himself. The 
otiose, the facile, surplusage : why are 
these abhorrent to the true literary ar- 
tist, except because, in literary as in 
ail other art, structure is all-impor- 
tant, felt, or painfully missed, every- 
where ? — that architectural conception 
of work, which foresees the end in the 



I20 STYLE. 

beginning and never loses sight of it, 
an3^ in every part is conscious of all 
the rest, till the last sentence does 
but, with undiminished vigour, unfold 
and justify the first — a condition of 
literary art, which, in contradistinc- 
tion to another quality of the artist 
himself, to be spoken of later, I shall 
call the necessity of mind in style. 

An acute philosophical writer, the 
late Dean Mansel (a writer whose 
works illustrate the literary beauty 
there may be in closeness, and with 
obvious repression or economy of a 
fine rhetorical gift) wrote a book, of 
fascinating precision in a very obscure 
subject, to show that all the technical \ 
laws of logic are but means of secur- ' 
ing, in each and all of its apprehen- 
sions, the unity, the strict identity 
with itself, of the apprehending mind. ' 



STYLE. 121 

All the laws of good writing aim at a 
similar unity or identity of the mind 
in all the processes by which the word 
is associated to its import. The term 
is right, and has its essential beauty, 
when it becomes, in a manner, what it 
signifies, as with the names of simple 
sensations. To give the phrase, the^ 
sentence, the structural member, the) 
entire composition, song, or essay, a ; 
similar unity with its subject and with 
itself : — style is in the right way when 
it tends towards that. All depends]? 
upon the original unity, the vital , 
wholeness and identity, of the initia- / 
tory apprehension or view. So much s 
is true of all art, which therefore < 
requires always its logic, its compre- ' 
hensive reason — insight, foresight, 
retrospect, in simultaneous action — • 
true, most of all, of the literary art, as 



\J 



12 2 STYLE. 

being of all the arts most closely cog- 
nate to the abstract intelligence. Such 
logical coherency may be evidenced 
not merely in the lines of composition 
as a whole, but in the choice of a 
single word, while it by no means in- 
terferes with, but may even prescribe, 
much variety, in the building of the 
sentence for instance, or in the 
manner, argumentative, descriptive, 
discursive, of this or that part or 
member of the entire design. The 
blithe, crisp sentence, decisive as a 
child's expression of its needs, may 
alternate with the long-contending, 
victoriously intricate sentence; the 
sentence, born with the integrity of a 
single word, relieving the sort of sen- 
tence in which, if you look closely, 
you can see much contrivance, much 
adjustment, to bring a highly quali- 



^ 



STYLE. 123 

fied matter into compass at one view. 
For the literary architecture, if it is <^ 
to be rich and expressive, involves 
not only foresight of the end in the 
beginning, but also development or 
growth of design, in the process of ^ 
execution, with many irregularities, \ 
surprises, and afterthoughts; the con- ^ 
tingent as well as the necessary being 
subsumed under the unity of the whole. 
As truly, to the lack of such archi- 
tectural design, of a single, almost vis- 
ual, image, vigorously informing an 
entire, perhaps very intricate, com- 
position, which shall be austere, ornate, 
argumentative, fanciful, yet true from 
first to last to that vision within, may 
be attributed those weaknesses of con- 
scious or unconscious repetition of 
word, phrase, motive, or member of 
the whole matter, indicating, as Flau- 



124 STYLE. 

bert was aware, an original structure 
in thought not organically complete. 
With such foresight, the actual con- 
clusion will most often get itself writ- 
ten out of hand, before, in the more 
obvious sense, the work is finished. 
With some strong and leading sense 
of the world, the tight hold of which 
secures true composition and not mere 
loose accretion, the literary artist, I 
suppose, goes on considerately, set- 
ting joint to joint, sustained by yet 
restraining the productive ardour, re- 
tracing the negligences of his first 
sketch, repeating his steps only that he 
may give the reader a sense of secure 
and restful progress, readjusting mere 
assonances even, that they may soothe 
the reader, or at least not interrupt him i 
on his way; and then, somewhere be- 
fore the end comes, is burdened, in- 



STYLE. 125 

Spired, with his conclusion, and be- 
s times delivered of it, leaving off, not 
in weariness and because he finds hini- 
\self at an end, but in all the freshness 
'of volition. His work now structurally 
complete, with all the accumulating ' 
effect of secondary shades of mean- 
ing, he finishes the whole up to the 
just proportion of that ante-penulti- \ 
mate conclusion, and all becomes ex- 1 
Ipressive. The house he has built is 
rather a body he has informed. And so 
it happens, to its greater credit, that 
the better interest even of a narrative 
to be recounted, a story to be told, will 
often be in its second reading. And 
though there are instances of great 
writers who have been no artists, an 
unconscious tact sometimes directing 
work in which we may detect, very 
pleasurably, many of the effects of con- 



126 STYLE, 

scious art, yet one of the greatest pleas- 
ures of really good prose literature is 
in the critical tracing out of that con- 
scious artistic structure, and the per- 
vading sense of it as we read. Yet 
of poetic literature too; for, in truth, 
the kind of constructive intelligence 
here supposed is one of the forms of 
the imagination. 

That is the special function of mind, 
in style. Mind and soul: — hard to 
ascertain philosophically, the distinc- 
tion is real enough practically, for 
they often interfere, are sometimes in 
conflict, with each other. Blake, in 
the last century, is an instance of pre- 
ponderating soul, embarrassed, at a 
loss, in an area of preponderating 
mind. As a quality of style, at all 
events, soul is a fact, in certain writers 
.« — the way they have of absorbing 



STYLK. 127 

language, of attracting it into the 1 
peculiar spirit they are of, with a 
subtlety which makes the actual 
result seem like some inexplicable 
inspiration. ]ly mind, the literary 
artist reaches us, through static and 
objective indications of design in his 
work, legible to all. Jiy soul, he 
reaches us, somewhat capriciously 
perhaps, one and not another, through 
vagrant sympathy and a kind of imme- 
diate contact. Mind we cannot choose 
but approve where we recognise it; 
soul may repel us, not because we 
misunderstand it. The way in which 
theological interests sometimes avail 
themselves of language is perhaps 
the best illustration of the force I 
mean to indicate generally in liter- 
ature, by the word sou/. Ardent relig- 
ious persuasion may exist, may make 



128 STYLE. 

its way, without finding any equiva- 
lent heat in language : or, again, it 
may enkindle words to various de- 
grees, and when it really takes hold 
of them doubles its force. Religious 
history presents many remarkable in- 
stances in which, through no mere 
phrase-worship, an unconscious liter- 
ary tact has, for the sensitive, laid 
open a privileged pathway from one 
to another. "The altar-fire," people 
say, "has touched those lips!" The 
Vulgate, the English Bible, the Eng- 
lish Prayer-Book, the writings of 
Swedenborg, the Tracts for the Times : 
— there, we have instances of widely 
different and largely diffused phases 
of religious feeling in operation as 
soul in style. But something of the 
same kind acts with similar power in 
certain writers of quite other than 



STYLE. 129 

theological literature, on behalf of 
I'some wholly personal and peculiar 
sense of theirs. Most easily illus- 
trated by theological literature, this 
quality lends to profane writers a 
kind of religious influence. At 
their best, these writers become, as 
we say sometimes, "prophets"; such 
character depending on the effect not 
merely of their matter, but of their mat- 
ter as allied to, in "electric afifinity" 
with, peculiar form, and working in 
all cases by an immediate sympathetic 
contact, on which account it is that 
it may be called soul, as opposed to [ 
mind, in style. And this too is a fac- ] 
ulty of choosing and rejecting what 
is congruous or otherwise, with a drift 
towards unity — unity of atmosphere 
here, as there of design — soul secur- 
ing colour (or perfume, might we 

K 



1 30 STYLE. 

say?) as mind secures form, the latter 
])eing essentially finite, the former 
vagiie or infinite, as the inHuence of 
a living person is practically infinite. 
I There are some to whom nothing has 
any real interest, fjr real meaning, 
except as operative in a given person; 
and it is they who Ijest appreciate the 
quality of soul in literary art. ""J'hey 
seem to know a person, in a book, 
and make way l^y intuition: yet, al- 
though they thus enjoy the complete- 
ness of a personal information, it is 
still a characteristic of soul, in this 
sense of the word, that it does but 
suggest what can never be uttered, not 
as ])cing different from, or more ob- 
scure than, what actually gets sai(], but 
as containing that plenary substance 
of which there is only one phase or 
facet in what is there expressed. 



I 



STYLE. 1 3 I 

If all high things have their martyrs, 
Gustave Flaubert might perhaps rank 
as the martyr of literary style. In his 
printed correspondence, a curious 
series of letters, written in his 
twenty-fifth year, records what seems 
to have been his one other passion — 
a series of letters which, with its fine 
casuistries, its firmly repressed an- 
guish, its tone of harmonious grey, 
and the sense of disillusion in which 
the whole matter ends, might have 
been, a few slight changes supposed, 
one of his own fictions. Writing to 
Madame X. certainly he does display, 
by "taking thought" mainly, by con- 
stant and delicate pondering, as in his 
love for literature, a heart really moved, 
but still more, and as the pledge of that 
motion, a loyalty to his work. Ma- 
dame X., too, is a literary artist, and the 



132 STYLE. 

best gifts he can send her are precepts 
of perfection in art, counsels for the 
effectual pursuit of that better love. 
In his love-letters it is the pains and 
pleasures of art he insists on, its sol- 
aces : he communicates secrets, re- 
proves, encourages, with a view to 
that. Whether the lady was dissatis- 
fied with such divided or indirect 
service, the reader is not enabled to 
see; but sees that, on Flaubert's part 
at least, a living person could be no 
rival of what was, from first to last, 
his leading passion, a somewhat soli- 
tary and exclusive one. 

"I must scold you," he writes, "for one 
thing, which shocks, scandalises me, the small 
concern, namely, you show for art just now. As 
regards glory be it so : there, I approve. But 
for art ! — the one thing in life that is good 
and real — can you compare with it an earthly 
love? — prefer the adoration of a relative 



STYLE. 133 

beauty to the cultus of the true beauty? 
Well ! I tell you the truth. That is the one 
thing good in me : the one thing I have, to 
me estimable. For yourself, you blend with 
the beautiful a heap of alien things, the use- 
ful, the agreeable, what not? — 

" The only way not to be unhappy is to 
shut yourself up in art, and count everything 
else as nothing. Pride takes the place of all 
beside when it is established on a large basis. 
Work! God wills it. That, it seems to me, is 
clear. — 

" I am reading over again the JEneid, cer- 
tain verses of which I repeat to myself to 
satiety. There are phrases there which stay 
in one's head, by which I find myself beset, 
as with those musical airs which are for ever 
returning, and cause you pain, you love them 
so much. I observe that I no longer laugh 
much, and am no longer depressed. I am 
ripe. You talk of my serenity, and envy me. 
It may well surprise you. Sick, irritated, the 
prey a thousand times a day of cruel pain, I 
continue my labour like a true working-man, 
who, with sleeves turned up, in the sweat of his 
brow, beats away at his anvil, never troubling 



134 STYLE. 

himself whether it rains or blows, for hail or 
thunder. I was not like that formerly. The 
change has taken place naturally, though my 
will has counted for something in the matter. — 
"Those who write in good style are some- 
times accused of a neglect of ideas, and of the 
moral end, as if the end of the physician were 
something else than healing, of the painter 
than painting — as if the end of art were not, 
before all else, the beautiful." 

What, then, did Flaubert under- 
stand by beauty, in the art he pur- 
sued with so much fervour, with so 
much self-command? Let us hear a 
sympathetic commentator : — 

" Possessed of an absolute belief that there 
exists but one way of expressing one thing, 
one word to call it by, one adjective to qualify, 
one verb to animate it, he gave himself to 
superhuman labour for the discovery, in every 
phrase, of that word, that verb, that epithet. 
In this way, he believed in some mysterious 
harmony of expression, and when a true word 
seemed to him to lack euphony still went 



i 



STYLE. 135 

on seeking another, with invincible patience, 
certain that he had not yet got hold of the 
unique word. ... A thousand preoccupations 
would beset him at the same moment, always 
with this desperate certitude fixed in his spirit : 
Among all the expressions in the world, all 
forms and turns of expression, there is but one 
— one form, one mode — to express what I 
want to say." 

The one word for the one thing, the 
one thought, amid the multitude of 
words, terms, that might just do: the 
problem of style was there ! — the 
unique word, phrase, sentence, para- 
graph, essay, or song, absolutely proper 
to the single mental presentation or 
vision within. In that perfect justice,\ 
overand above the many contingent and 
removable beauties with which beauti- 
ful style may charm us, but which it 
can exist without, independent of them 
yet dexterously availing itself of them, 



\ 



136 STYLE. 

omnipresent in good work, in function 
It every point, from single epithets to 
the rhytlim of a whole book, lay the 
specific, indispensable, very intellect- 
ual, beauty of literature, the possibil- 
ity of which constitutes it a fine art. 

One seems to detect the influence 
of a philosophic idea there, the idea 
of a natural economy, of some pre- 
existent adaptation, between a rela- 
tive, somewhere in the world of 
thought, and its correlative, somer 
where in the world of language — 
both alike, rather, somewhere in the 
mind of the artist, desiderative, ex- 
pectant, inventive — meeting each 
other with the readiness of "soul 
and body reunited," in Blake's rapt- 
urous design; and, in fact, Flaubert 
was fond of giving his theory philo- 
sophical expression. — 



STYLE. 137 

' ' There are no beautiful thoughts," he would 
say, " without beautiful forms, and conversely. 
As it is impossible to extract from a physical 
body the qualities which really constitute it 
— colour, extension, and the like — without 
reducing it to a hollow abstraction, in a word, 
without destroying it ; just so it is impossible 
to detach the form from the idea, for the idea 
only exists by virtue of the form," 

All the recognised flowers, the re- 
movable ornaments of literature (in- 
cluding harmony and ease in reading 
aloud, very carefully considered by 
him) counted certainly; for these too 
are part of the actual value of what 
one says. But still, after all, with 
Flaubert, the search, the unwearied 
research, was not for the smooth, or 
winsome, or forcible word, as such, 
as with false Ciceronians, but quite 
simply and honestly, for the world's 
adjustment to its meaning. The first 



138 STYLE. 

condition of this must be, of course, to 
know yourself, to have ascertained 
your own sense exactly. Then, if we 
suppose an artist, he says to the reader, 
— I want you to see precisely what 
I see. Into the mind sensitive to 
"form," a flood of random sounds, 
colours, incidents, is ever penetrating 
from the w^orld without, to become, 
by sympathetic selection, a part of its 
very structure, and, in turn, the vis- 
ible vesture and expression of that 
other world it sees so steadily within, 
nay, already with a partial conformity 
thereto, to be refined, enlarged, cor- 
rected, at a hundred points; and it is 
just there, just at those doubtful points 
that the function of style, as tact or 
taste, intervenes. The unique term I 
will come more quickly to one than 
another, at one time than another, 



STYLE. 139 

according also to the kind of matter 
in question. Quickness and slowness, 
ease and closeness alike, have nothing 
to do with the artistic character of the 
true word found at last. As there is a 
charm of ease, so there is also a spe-f 
cial charm in the signs of discovery, of ^ 
effort and contention towards a due 
end, as so often with Flaubert himself 
— in the style which has been pliant, 
as any obstinate, durable metal can be, 
to the inherent perplexities and recu- 
sancy of a certain difficult thought. 

If Flaubert had not told us, perhaps 
we should never have guessed how 
tardy and painful his own procedure 
really was, and after reading his con- 
fession may think that his almost end- 
less hesitation had much to do with 
diseased nerves. Often, perhaps, the 
felicity supposed will be the product 



140 STYLE. 

of a happier, a more exuberant nature 
than Flaubert's. Aggravated, certainly, 
by a morbid physical condition, that 
anxiety in " seeking the phrase," which 
gathered all the other small e?imns of 
a really quiet existence into a kind of 
battle, was connected with his lifelong 
contention against facile poetry, facile 
art — art, facile and flimsy; and what 
constitutes the true artist is not the 
slowness or quickness of the process, 
but the absolute success of the result. 
As with those labourers in the parable, 
the prize is independent of the mere 
length of the actual day's work. " You 
talk," he writes, odd, trying lover, to 
Madame X. — 

" You talk of the exclusiveness of my liter- 
ary tastes. That might have enabled you to 
divine what kind of a person I am in the 
matter of love. I grovi^ so hard to please as a 



STYLE. 141 

literary artist, that I am driven to despair. 
I shall end by not writing another line." 

"Happy," he cries, in a moment of 
discouragement at that patient labour, 
which for him, certainly, was the con- 
dition of a great success — 

" Happy those who have no doubts of 
themselves ! who lengthen out, as the pen runs 
on, all that flows forth from their brains. 
As for me, I hesitate, I disappoint myself, 
turn round upon myself in despite : my taste 
is augmented in proportion as my natural 
vigour decreases, and I afflict my soul over 
some dubious word out of all proportion to 
the pleasure I get from a whole page of good 
writing. One would have to live two centuries 
to attain a true idea of any matter whatever. 
What Buff"on said is a big blasphemy : genius 
is not long-continued patience. Still, there is 
some truth in the statement, and more than 
people think, especially as regards our own 
day. Art ! art ! art ! bitter deception ! phan- 
tom that glows with light, only to lead one on 
to destruction." 



142 STYLE. 

Again — 

" I am growing so peevish about my writ- 
ing. I am like a man whose ear is true but 
who plays falsely on the violin : his fingers 
refuse to reproduce precisely those sounds of 
which he has the inward sense. Then the 
tears come rolling down from the poor scrap- 
er's eyes and the bow falls from his hand." 

Coming slowly or quickly, when it 
comes, as it came with so much labour 
of mind, but also with so much lustre, 
to Gustave Flaubert, this discovery of 
the word will be, like all artistic suc- 
cess and felicity, incapable of "strict 
analysis: effect of an intuitive condi- 
tion of mind, it must be recognised 
by like intuition on the part of the 
reader, and a sort of immediate sense. 
In every one of those masterly sen- 
tences of Flaubert there was, below all 
mere contrivance, shaping and after- 



STYLE. 143 

thought, by some happy instantaneous 
concourse of the various faculties of 
the mind with each other, the exact 
apprehension of what was needed to 
carry the meaning. And that it fits 
with absolute justice will be a judg- 
ment of immediate sense in the appre- 
ciative reader. We all feel this in 
what may be called inspired transla- 
tion. Well ! all language involves 
translation from inward to outward. 
In literature, as in all forms of art, 
there are the absolute and the merely 
relative or accessory beauties; and 
precisely in that exact proportion of 
the term to its purpose is the absolute 
beauty of style, prose or verse. All 
the good qualities, the beauties, of 
verse also, are such, only as precise 
expression. 

In the highest as in the lowliest lit- 



144 STYLE. 

erature, then, the one indispensable 
beauty is, after all, truth : — truth to 
bare fact in the latter, as to some per- 
sonal sense of fact, diverted somewhat 
from men's ordinary sense of it, in the 
former; truth there as accuracy, truth 
here as expression, that finest and most 
intimate form of truth, the vraie verite. 
And what an eclectic principle this 
really is! eniploying for its one sole 
purpose — that absolute accordance of 
expression to idea — ■ all othe r litera ry 
beauties an3 excellences whatever : 
fhow many kinds of style it covers, 
explains, justifies, and at the same 
^time safeguards! Scott's facility, 
Flaubert's deeply pondered evoca- 
tion of "the phrase," are equally 
good art. Say what you have to say, 
what you have a will to say, in the 
simplest, the most direct and exact 



STYLE. 145 

manner possible, with no surplusage: 
— there, is the justification of the sen- 
tence so fortunately born, "entire,'^ 
smooth, and round," that it needs no 
punctuation, and also (that is the 
point!) of the most elaborate period, 
if it be right in its elaboration. Here 
is the office of ornament: here also 
the purpose of restraint in ornament. 
As the exponent of truth, that austerity 
(the beauty, the function, of which in 
literature Flaubert understood so well) 
becomes not the correctness or purism 
of the mere scholar, but a security_ 
against the otiose, a jealous exclusion 
o>f what does not really tell towards the 
pursuit of relief, of life and vigour in_ 
the portraiture, oi oneL-S-Jiense^. Li- 
'cehse again, the making free with rule, 
if it be indeed, as people fancy, a 
habit of genius, flinging aside or 

L 



146 STYLE. 

transforming all that opposes the lib- 
erty of beautiful production, will be 
but faith to one's own meaning. The 
seeming baldness of Le Rouge et Le 
Noir is nothing in itself; the wild 
ornament of Les Miserables is nothing 
in itself; and the restraint of Flaubert, 
amid a real natural opulence, only re- 
doubled beauty — the phrase so large 
and so precise at the same time, hard 
as bronze, in service to the more per- 
fect adaptation of words to their mat- 
ter. Afterthoughts, retouchings, finish, 
will be of profit only so far as they too 
really serve to bring out the original, 
initiative, generative, sense in them. 

In this way, according to the well- 
known saying, "The style is the man," 
complex or simple, in his individu- 
ality, his plenary sense of what he 
really has to say, his sense of the 



STYLE. 147 

world; all cautions regarding style 
arising out of so many natural scru- 
ples as to the medium through which 
alone he can expose that inward sense 
of things, the purity of this medium, 
its laws or tricks of refraction : noth- 
ing is to be left there which might 
give conveyance to any matter save 
that. Style in all its varieties, re- 
served or opulent, terse, abundant, 
musical, stimulant, academic, so long 
as each is reallv characteristic or ex- 
pressive, finds thus its justification, ' 
the sumptuous good taste of Cicero 
being as truly the man himself, and 
not another, justified, yet insured in- ■ 
alienably to him, thereby, as would 
have been his portrait by Raffaelle, 
in full consular splendour, on his/ 
ivory chair. 

A relegation, you may say perhaps 



148 STYLE. 

— a relegation of style to the subjec- 
tivity, the mere caprice, of the indi- 
vidual, which must soon transform it 
into mannerism. Not so ! since there 
is, under the conditions supposed, for 
those elements of the man, for every 
lineament of the vision within, the one 
word, the one acceptable word, recog- 
nisable by the sensitive, by others "who 
have intelligence " in the matter, as 
absolutely as ever anything can be in 
the evanescent and delicate region of 
human language. The style, the man- 
] ner, would be the man, not in his 
unreasoned and really uncharacteristic 
caprices, involuntary or affected, but 
i in absolutely sincere apprehension of 
I what is most real to him. But let us 
hear our French guide again. — 

" Styles," says Flaubert^s commentator, 
^'Styles, as so many peculiar moulds, each of 



STYLE. 149 

which bears the mark of a particular writer, 
who is to pour into it the whole content of 
his ideas, were no part of his theory. What 
he believed in was Style : that is to say, a 
certain absolute and unique manner of ex- 
pressing a thing, in all its intensity and colour. 
For him the forj?i was the work itself. As 
in living creatures, the blood, nourishing the 
body, determines its very contour and exter- 
nal aspect, just so, to his mind, the matter, 
the basis, in a work of art, imposed, neces- 
sarily, the unique, the just expression, the 
measure, the rhythm — the for??i in all its 
characteristics." 

If the Style be the man, in all the 
colour and intensity of a veritable 
apprehension, it will be in a real 
sense "impersonal." 

I said, thinking of books like Victor 
Hugo's Les Miserables, that prose lit- 
erature was the characteristic art of the 
nineteenth century, as others, thinking 
of its triumphs since the youth of Bach, 



150 STYLE. 

have assigned that place to music. 
Music and prose literature are, in 
one sense, the opposite terms of art; 
the art of literature presenting to the 
imagination, through the intelligence, 
a range of interests, as free and various 
as those which music presents to it 
through sense. And certainly the 
tendency of what has beeri^here said 
is to bring literature too under those 
conditions, Ijy conformity to which 
music takes rank as the typically per- 
fect art. If music be the ideal of all 
art whatever, precisely because in 
music it is impossible to distinguish 
the form from the substance or mat- 



Ter, t'Ke su bject from the expression, 

then, literature, by finding its specific 

\ excellence in the absolute correspond- 

'^ ence of the term to its import, will 

be but fulfilling the condition of all 



i 



STYLE. 151 

artistic quality in things everywhere, 
of all good art. 

Good art, but not necessarily great 
art; the distinction between great art 
and good art depending immediately, 
as regards literature at all events, not 
on its form, but on the matter. Thack- 
eray's Esmond, surely, is greater art 
than Va7iity Fair, by the greater dig- 
nity of its interests. It is on the \ 
quality of the matter it informs or 
controls, its compass, its variety, its 
alliance to great ends, or the depth of i 

i 1 

the note of revolt, or the largeness of ' 
hope in it, that the greatness of liter- \ 
ary art depends, as The Divine Com- 
edy, Paradise Lost, Les Alise rabies. 
The English Bible, are great art. 
Given the conditions I have tried to 
explain as constituting good art ; — 
then, if it be devoted further to the 



152 ST\'LE. 

increase of men's happiness, to the 
redemption of the oppressed, or 
the enlargement of our sympathies 
with each other, or to such present- 
ment of new or old truth about our- 
selves and our relation to the world 
as may ennoble and fortify us in our 
sojourn here, or immediately, as with 
Dante, to the glory of God, it will be 
also great art; if, overand above those 
qualities I summed up as mind and 
soul — that colour and mystic per- 
fume, and that reasonable structure, 
it has something of the soul of human- 
ity in it, and finds its logical, its ar- 
chitectural place, in the great structure 
of human life. 



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